Not great

We just got out of the appointments at City of Hope, the cancer- specific hospital in LA.

Well. There were surprises.

God dammit.

We ended up changing our flights because I had to meet with two different surgeons.

We are at the airport now and I get home around midnight, so this is shaping up to be a very long day.

tl,dr: I need more tests. And this is going to be another <very> long journey.

I’ll summarize the main points because my brain can’t formulate full paragraphs right now.

• I saw both a neck and thoracic surgeon because they are pretty certain that the cancer has spread into my chest.

• Because of that, they can’t just do the thyroid neck dissection surgery as they won’t be able to reach the nodes in my chest.

• So, I will definitely be having the neck dissection, which includes 3 parts – removing the lymph nodes on either side of neck (lateral), removing the thyroid, and removing the lymph nodes below the thyroid.

• After that, there are 3 possible additional surgical routes (all of which will include the radioactive iodine as well)

  • They go in robotically through the right ribs and remove the chest nodes from there

  • They have to do a partial sternotomy (ie, cut my chest open again) and remove thetop chest nodes from there

  • They have to do both of those.

All of this hinges on yet another chest CT (this time with contrast) once they confirm the cancer, and can identify the location and amount of cancer that exist. I sent a message to my local endocrinologist to get this scheduled. Ultimately he wants absolute proof that these are cancer before they do anything, so depending on the CT results, I might also have to have a biopsy of one of the lymph nodes in my chest as well.

Clearly this is going to be a journey and I have a lot to think about. If I do have to have the sternotomy, there are obviously a lot of risks since I have been there done that already. Honestly there are lots of risks with all of these surgeries because of my history and the amount of cancer.

Overall, I’m not feeling great about anything but have to power through until we have the ct scan results. And then probably some other test after that.

I’m so incredibly grateful for my friend Kaylee, who traveled on this journey with met. She took amazing notes, fully supported me when I got too drunk at dinner the night before, and when I broke down in the office (after telling the doctor “thanks for fucking up my goal of no surprises” which he accepted gracefully). Don’t I sound like a gem to travel with!? She deserves a medal.