Ric: Thyroid cancer survivor My name is Ric, I live in Londonderry, New Hampshire. I'm fifty-five years old and have been married to Diane for 33 years. I was born in West Virginia, moved to New England in 1971, where I've been working in public relations and publicity. And I'm currently public information director in second largest community health center in Massachusetts, which is ironic, given that I was diagnosed with thyroid cancer in 1995, just about 8 months after I started working there. My diagnosis was discovered at the end of our annual physical. I asked my doctor to look at a lump in my throat, and we began a series of tests and I had surgery in October of '95. My diagnosis was poorly differentiated follicular carcinoma with Hurthle cell variant, all of which translates to, this is not a good kind of thyroid cancer to have, even if thyroid cancer is a highly curable disease. Well over 80% of the people with thyroid cancer live to die of old age. This is a very survivable cancer. Follicular, however, is a little trickier, and my tumor was large. It was 8cm by 10cm and by the time we had the surgery, it had grown into my jugular vein so they had to resect the jugular vein, and the surgery instead of being a couple hours, went six and a half hours. And it was complicated and I woke up from surgery and found that I had bilateral vocal cord paralysis, so I couldn't breathe or speak well. And a week after my initial surgery, where the left lobe of my thyroid was removed, they went back in and did an emergency tracheotomy, so I had a breathing tube in my neck for three or four months. That was the tough part, because they actually didn't know whether the vocal cord nerves, the pharyngeal nerves, were gonna grow back or not. Sometimes they do and sometimes they don't, and sometimes they grow back but they're not fully back. So living with that trach in my neck with all the complications that brings, was really scary, especially given the kind of work I do. That was tough. I went to Mass Eye and Ear Infirmary in Boston and saw some great physicians, and they watched me carefully, and after a few months, the vocal cords started coming back, and about four months later they removed the tube in my neck, and life was good again.
 The
fine print
Thyroid cancer is a very tricky thing, because it's really a chronic
disease, it affects you every day for the rest of your life. It's in that
respect it's much like other chronic diseases, like diabetes. You have to take
medication, because it's kind of a sneaking disease, in spite of its high cure
rate. You have to blood test on a regular basis, you have to have diagnostic
scans on a regular basis, and periodically you have to have radiation
treatments. All of which means that for every day for the rest of your life
you have to live with this disease. It's not like a lot of cancers where
you're five years out and you think, "I'm cured. This is great." Thyroid
cancer, you can't do that. The people who get in trouble with thyroid cancer
down the road are the people who are not vigilant in working with their
doctors to stay on top of their disease. And then, a lot of us make a lot of
mistakes. When I was diagnosed, I was 50 years old, I was a very poor student
of my disease. I didn't learn a lot about my disease before my surgery and I
mean, things I've learned since: I should have seen an endocrinologist before
my surgery, and I should have gone to specialist who treated hundreds,
thousands, of patients like myself. But I didn't do that. And the problem is
that thyroid cancer is only 1% of all cancers diagnosed in the United States
right now, that means that my general surgeon, my local endocrinologist in New
Hampshire saw actually very few people with thyroid cancer. Thyroid
cancer, usually when you have your surgery, then a year or so later you end up
having radiation, and radiation with thyroid cancer is tough in some ways.
It's actually radio iodine therapy and you have a pill or liquid and you
swallow it. So you ingest this radiation and then you go into an isolation
room in a hospital for two or three days. And for ten days afterward you have
to stay away from pregnant women and children and eat on paper plates and
sleep separately, and it's a long, complicated post treatment regimen. I've
done this now six times, and have a lifetime dose of 1200 millicuries, which
is the type of radiation that we get. It's hard because, the tough part is you
have to go off your Synthroid which is the hormone that you replace the
natural function of your thyroids, you have to go off your Synthroid for six
or seven weeks prior to your testing, your scans, and your body crashes. Your
system crashes. Your metabolism, everything slows down. I get cold. My body
temperature drops down to between 95 and 96 degrees. I go from sleeping my
normal six hours a night to sleeping twelve, fourteen hours a night. You get
cranky. Your brain doesn't work very well. You learn not to make decisions.
It's tough. I'm living in limbo. I no longer have a clear cut path in front of
me, and the treatment options are limited, and they're tough. These are tough
days. But, I'm waiting for the next miracle. But I'm also very realistic in -
couple weeks ago I started working with palliative care services at Mass
General Hospital, to begin looking at really what my options are. If the
tumors grow, if the tumors become difficult, I need to learn now about pain
management, I need to learn about looking at good nutrition to make sure that
my body resources are maximum so I can live as well as possible for as long as
possible. I need to look at, I need to start thinking about Advance Directives
and I need to think about medical proxies and I mean all of the kind of nuts
and bolts stuff that you have to look at at the end of life. I don't think I'm
there. I don't think my cancer is gonna grow that fast, but it might. So, I
think the end of life should be as important as any other part of life, in
fact, I think it's what our lives all grow toward. So, that's my next plan.
That's it. Anybody has any questions about the Thyroid Cancer Survivors'
Association, Inc., go to www.thyca.org and
there are resources for all thyroid cancer survivors. (Editor's note:
the audio portion of this show contains what was the Web address at the
time of recording. The text above contains the new Web address, www.thyca.org.)
|
Time of audio unavailable