thyroid cancer
OK, time for another bit of news that I would’ve posted about months ago if I hadn’t broken my old website. But now that this new one works, here it is: I learned in late 2025 that I have cancer. Not skin cancer, which I’ve had five times now, not surprising for a super white middle aged man who spent almost his whole live around a mile high, most of that in an era before sunscreen was widely used. No, this new one is thyroid cancer.
Thyroid surgery
Yesterday, I had surgery to remove half of my thyroid gland, the one with the tumor in it. From what I can tell, surgery seems to have gone well. It was an outpatient procedure. I’m taking the rest of the week off work by doctor’s orders. I guess some people take two weeks ago, but since I just have a desk job and don’t have to lift stuff, one week should be plenty (I hope).
Here’s a comfort I haven’t had before in pre-op. Instead of using a big blanket warmer to warm up traditional blankets that then cool down in 30 minutes, they now have these hollow silver blankets that they recirculate warm air through. This kept my legs warm in the pre-op area, during surgery (I think), and in the recovery room. Brooke thought it was funny because I look like a big burrito wrapped up in aluminum foil. This photo was before surgery.
And then this photo was around three hours later, after surgery. Still enjoying the warm blanket, but a bit out of it. I woke up with a bad headache in the back of my head. But once I sat up, drank some Dazbog iced mocha, and let a pain pill digest, it got somewhat better. I realized most of the pain was in the back of the neck and where the neck muscles attach to the head. I think it was caused by two things - caffeine withdrawal and sleeping on this rubber donut pillow for the surgery. It was strange that the pain on the back of my head was worse than the pain in the throat where they had just cut out one of my organs. As I write this the day after, it’s evened out some.
What is the thyroid?
What is the thyroid? The thyroid gland, I’ve learned, is in your throat. It’s an endocrine gland shaped like a butterfly right under the Adam’s apple (or where it would be if you don’t have one). It has two nodes connected with what they call an isthmus. Speaking of weird medical etymology, the doctor who named the thyroid gland in 1656 chose that name because the shape is very similar to a style of shield that ancient Greeks used in battle called a thyos.
Oh, another cool piece of trivia: Leonardo DaVinci was the first person to draw an illustration of the thyroid gland.
Detecting cancer
Thyroid cancer is, as you can probably guess, when you get a tumor in one or both of the two nodes. There are a few types, from what I understand. And fortunately I have the one that is most common and also the most treatable.
How did I find out? Long story, but there may be a lesson here you might learn from so pay attention. About a year ago, my PCP told me about a service that some medical imaging companies are offering now to do a “whole body MRI”. Insurance doesn’t cover it, because nobody has yet proven that the cost of an MRI is less than the average cost of dealing with whatever problems it finds. But knowing this, the companies that offer it keep the price reasonable, since they know all their customers will be paying “cash” out of pocket. Anyhow, I did the scan several months ago, and then had a consultation with someone to go over all the stuff it spotted. Most of it I already knew about, but there were a couple things that were new to me. One of those was that one node of my thyroid gland looked unusually large. So they recommended I get an ultrasound on it.
A month or so later, I got in for that ultrasound. The results of that were that it looked fishy and should be biopsied. So a month after that I had an uncomfortable biopsy - a fine needle aspiration, it’s called. The doctor who took that sent it to the hospital’s in-house lab first, and they said, “Hmm, this does look weird. Let’s send it to a company that specializes in genetic analysis so we can get more details.” That took another week or so. I knew something was up when I got a call from one of the doctor’s assistants saying that he wanted to schedule a live call for me tomorrow. If the lab results came back as negative, I figured the assistant would’ve just said, “No problems, keep eating healthy and drinking lots of water. Have a good day.” (or whatever).
Anyhow, the next day I had an awkward video call with the doc and he explained all the above to me (minute the geeky stuff about the word origin). Awkward because I think he was going it from his phone in a part of the hospital that has shitting cellular data coverage, so lots of disconnects, lags, etc.
The doc said there are two ways I could go. I could have a consult with endocrinology first to talk about risks and what would happen if I don’t have the tumor removed. Or I could go straight to scheduling surgery to remove it. In the end we did both. The soonest the doctor was available to cut it out was three months in the future (this guy seems very popular). So I just had to chill out for October, November, December, and January knowing this thing was inside of me waiting to get removed.
2025 was surgery free!
OK, here’s a funny side story. You may know I take Pilates classes for one of my forms of exercise. I’ve been doing it something like 12 or 13 years now, and found it’s a great way to counteract all the time I spend sitting at a computer. One of the instructors at the Pilates studio has been training me for long enough she can remember me being out for extending periods to have various surgeries. I told her toward the end of 2025 that it looks like I’m going to get out of the year with no surgeries. In 2023 I had shoulder surgery for rotator cuff repair, in 2024 I had abdominal surgery for hernia repair, but no surgery in 2025. And then I got diagnosed with the thyroid cancer. But the soonest I could have the operation was 2026. So yay, 2025 was my free year. I’m allowed to resume exercise two weeks after surgery so I was hoping to check in with this instructor to let her know how it went, but then I found that she abruptly left the studio, so I probably will never seen her again. Oh well.