Yesterday was my Ear, Nose, and Throat Dr. (ENT) consult. I came away from it much more relieved than I had been since this whole thing started.
The Dr. told me that my fine needle biopsy results were a gray zone. (I had already heard this from the endocrinologist last week and then spent the next few days searching the web to understand just what that means and why is surgery warranted.) As there is a good chance that the thyroid nodule is benign, they will wait until it has reached the size of 3 cm before progressing on to surgery. It is currently 2 cm I've been having CT scans related to my endometrial cancer at a scheduled pace and nothing had ever turned up in them that I'd been informed of so one of my concerns was just how long I've had this problem and how quickly has it been growing. The Dr. was able to access my 2011 CT scan as the earliest one and said that the nodule showed up in it and it was 1.5 cm then. To my ears that sounds hopeful that I won't need surgery anytime soon. Whew...
I asked about surgery just so I can mentally prepare for it. He explained that the operation takes about 2-and-a-half hours. First, they remove the side of the thyroid with the nodule. Next, they do a quick check to see if they can determine cancer or not. If there is no cancer then the surgery is finished but if they find cancer then they remove the other half of the thyroid. The time spent in the hospital is 7 days. On day 7 they remove the stitches and release the patient. Normal life can resume from day 10.
One piece of good news was that if they only take half of the thyroid I will not need the hormonal replacement therapy. That was another big relief. I was happy to hear that the treatment all in all is conservative as I'd been reading online what I could in English. It sounds as if the treatment plan in America is much more radical and aggressive for people over 45, even though about 80% of people with this inconclusive result prior to surgery only have a benign condition that really doesn't warrant removal of the entire thyroid and life-long hormonal replacement.
Next, I wanted to know about radio-iodine treatment if it should prove to be cancer. I have 2 small grandchild who may be moving in with us in the future and I read a lot of scary stuff about that treatment and wanted to know how things are done in Japan. He said that it's taken in pill form and that I won't be able to have contact with small children for 3 to 6 months afterward but my grandkids could actually be grown up by the time I get to that stage of things. He said that treatment is selected according to patient.
He did mention that the type of cancer I might have can metastasis to the lymph and lungs.
Anyway, I felt much better knowing that I won't have to have an aggressive surgery soon so can start start making plans for some fun things in the coming months. I'll have my next follow-up appointment in 6 months, with an ultrasound first, and then seeing the Dr. soon afterward on the same day.
