Pre-Surgery

To combat the papillary thyroid cancer that I’ve got, my consultant proposed two stages of treatments: firstly, a total throidectomy (total removal of my thyroid) plus neck dissection for taking out the lymph nodes and secondly, radioactive iodine treatment. For the latter, I am going to explain more in details when it comes to it.

What I really wanted to know was that when exactly this cancer started to develope – apparently I would never find out as I was told by the consultant. So what I did was to go through all the pictures I’ve taken the last two years and see if I could find any lumps or any signs.

Nov 2016

Dec 2016

To be honest, I am not so sure if I could see anything.

 

Fast forward to the day of my surgery………

I still can’t see anything on the picture if I am honest, that’s how scary it was to think back. I could have easily ignored this little lump I detected as I felt completely fine with no symptoms. These pictures were taken when Louis and I were waiting in the ward from 7am til 1pm just before the surgery. My consultant has put an arrow with a black marker pen on my neck to indicate which side they would perform my neck dissection on. Louis joked that maybe he should just put a few more markers on random places, just to confuse them of course 🙂

Considered that I had been starving since 12 midnight the night before and not being able to drink water since 5am that morning………

Me jolting down notes for my blog

Oh so chic surgery gown and compression socks combo

My hero Dave who wheeled me into the theatre

My heart was beating very  fast as I was on the wheelchair, it suddenly kicked in that I was going to do this.