26 Good Things About Thyroid Cancer

Today it’s official: Jack is getting baptized next Sunday at the church we’ve been attending for a few years, Salem Lutheran. I am thrilled.

After years of wanting to have him baptized, it was finally perfect timing, and it’s really happening!!! We have Pommy’s blessing, and Jack is OK with it (which is not to say that Jack’s approval is required, but at least he’s not nervous about it anymore. Here is more evidence that God is always working—working on me, on Pommy, on the kids, on everything and everyone at all times. He doesn’t take a day off. It must be exhausting.

26 Good Things About Thyroid Cancer
Actually, there are more than 26
Being grateful it’s not terminal pancreatic cancer
Chemotherapy, as in “none required”
Doing things you’ve always wanted to do because any cancer diagnosis makes you want to live life more fully
Everyday is a blessing (everyday has always been a blessing, but it seems more true now)
Fancy thyroid scar
Gummy bears eaten at 10 am with running friends is OK on low-iodine diet. This alone is cause for celebration!
Hair loss from changes in Synthroid dose minimal and only noticeable to me
It’s easier not to sweat the small stuff now.
Jokes about thyroids open up whole new department in my sense of humor
Kangaroos rarely diagnosed with it
Low-iodine diet results in small amount of weight loss and much healthier eating habits, if only temporarily
MRIs I wouldn’t otherwise have had done rule out other diseases and bad stuff.
New appreciation for the thyroid’s contribution to bodily processes. Very underrated gland.
Opportunity to show my kids how to have faith and be brave through trials
People tell you they love you and show you they care when you get diagnosed, and it feels good to be loved.
Quality of life better now
Radioactive iodine treatment, which for me results in loss of taste for 4-5 weeks afterwards, makes me really appreciate food when the taste buds come back.
Sleeping through dinner perfectly acceptable when hypo for scans or treatment
This list
Undeniable presence of God throughout trials
Vegetables and fruit, allowed on the low-iodine diet, produce delightfully regular stools.
Writing responses to newly diagnosed patients on the thyroid cancer listserv; it feels so good to give back and help others the way others helped me after I was diagnosed.
Xylophone playing allowed—no, encouraged—while in isolation after RAI.
Yodeling also OK while in isolation. (For that matter, anything goes. Who’s going to tell you “no”? After all, you’re radioacive, dude.)
Zapper, bug (I’ve been told I am a bug zapper when I’m radioactive. I’ll have the opportunity to test this theory in 4 days.)

Everything on the timeline of my life has fallen onto one side or the other of my radioactive iodine treatment--sort of like BC and AD. Except it's BRAI and ARAI (Before Radioactive Iodine and After Radioactive Iodine). I can’t think of life as one continuum anymore—the same way I couldn’t fathom it as a continuum when I was about to give birth to both my boys. You know that things will be different afterwards (much more so with a new baby, but…), and you obsessively prepare to try and make the transition easier, but nothing you do really prepares you completely for the new life that waits on the other side of the date, whatever the date may be.

Will I have salivary gland damage? Will I lose my sense of taste again? Will I get teary eyes like I did last time? Will I feel nauseous—even a little queasy? Will I feel like I’m buzzing? Will I sleep a lot? (I didn’t sleep that much last time, but I was in a hospital room for 48 hours after the dose, and this time I’ll be at home in my cozy cocoon.) Will Jack have an easier time with accepting me back after I’m safe to be around? That was hard last year.

I do feel lucky to be going through this. though. My aunt lost her husband, Dale, to prostate cancer in TK, and I imagine that her life now feels to her like it was split into two parts on the day he died. There was Before Dale’s Death and now there’s After Dale’s Death. And there is no smoothing over or filling of the chasm that opened up on the day he went to Heaven.

One of the girls my sister and I run with every Saturday just had her best friend undergo brain surgery for a totally unexpected golfball-sized brain tumor the doctors found on an MRI. The gal is doing well but will need some additional treatment--radiation and/or chemo. Another reason I am lucky to have this.

That's what's so easy about dumb old thyroid cancer. It pales in comparison to what others are going through.