BYB Sunday: Thyroid Tumor Biopsy & Treatment

Welcome to Blog Your Blessings Sunday.

Continued from What Caused My Enlarged Thyroid?

When I finally got to the biopsy appointment I was sporting a mild fever and felt crummy. I snoozed forty-five minutes as best I could with shivers before I finally was called to the procedure room. The doctor came in and recounted what I already knew about the thyroid mass.

"Not all tumors are cancerous," he said.

Wait. I had a tumor? I thought I had a goiter. But then I understood they were the same. Hearing the word tumor suddenly made things very clear. I had a serious condition, and according to the doctor, a tumor is not caused by iodine deficiency. That blew all my hope of a peaceful resolution, especially when he said they begin to look at biopsying when tumors reach 1-2 cm. At over 4 cm, mine needed biopsy, no question. And it was large enough to biopsy in the office without the assistance of ultra sound.

The doc laid out my chair, put a towel under my neck, and had me lay my head back. Jim says the lump in my neck really looked huge then. My doc injected lidocaine into my thyroid, once shallow, which burned some, and once deeper which hurt more. Then he took a needle that would section out small cylinders of my thyroid, went in from the center of my thyroid and moved it in and out toward my left ear sucking out cells like a liposuction surgeon at work. I felt movement, but not much pain. He repeated the procedure, going deeper. I winced. When done, my left ear ached from displaced pain.

Then I had to wait three weeks for a follow up appointment. Three weeks for biopsy results. By this time, it was January.

Maybe other people would have been banging down the door for biopsy results, but I was like I had been when nine months pregnant with my first child--content to remain in waiting because it didn't require more effort.

I finally made it back to the doctor the forth week in January. I expected that if the result was negative for thyroid cancer he would give me a list of options including watching it to see if it shrunk, which I had been praying for and expected, giving me thyroid medicine to shrink it, or a last resort of surgery.

"There are four types of thyroid cancer," he began when he came in. He listed one and said, "You don't have that." Another. "You don't have that." Another. "You don't have that." And then he said, "the cells in the tumor are follicular," and explained that the thyroid consists of follicular cells like what hair grows out of, only in the center of the follicle is pools of thyroid hormone. My tumor was a mass of the material that makes the holes, but missing the pools.

There was 15-20% chance it was cancer, maybe 25% chance because of its size. But the biopsy alone could not tell. The only way to know for sure what it was, was to remove and dissect it.

He urged me to have the removal surgery. The tumor was simply too big for him to feel comfortable watching, and with the vocal nerve behind it, waiting could only make later removal more difficult or cause me to lose my voice. Surgery would entail removing the entire left lobe since the tumor was so big it filled the whole lobe.

Tears came to my eyes but I tried not to heed them. What happened to several options and trying synthetic hormone? Jim questioned the kind of cells it was and confirmed that if cancerous, it was the kind that could spread through my blood stream to other parts of my body.

The doctor left to give Jim and I a few moments to discuss things. I knew as he walked out what Jim was already thinking. And I agreed. There was only one way to go.

I walked out of the appointment with a surgery date for the following week (this past Tuesday). On my way to the hospital for blood work I prayed if it was the right decision. I felt immediate assurance that it was. Peace settled in my soul alongside the grief I felt for having to go through surgery I didn't want. As long as I was in God's will, I could go forward with confidence.

My blessing this Blog Your Blessing Sunday is that the thyroid tumor is now out and the preliminary results of it taken during surgery came back benign. Stitches and the final pathology report comes this Tuesday afternoon, February 5. In the mean time, I'm enduring recovering with deep gratitude for God's loving care and letting my enlarged thyroid be found before it got bigger.

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