Thyroid Cancer, Diagnosis

I looked up "cancer survivor" on the Internet, and I like this definition: "Someone who has completed initial cancer management and has no apparent evidence of active disease." By that definition, I am not yet a cancer survivor, but I hope to be soon. For now, I am a cancer patient.


On July 29, I went to my doctor, Dr. Johnson, for a physical, because I wanted to go to Cub Scout camp with Jarrod, and they require a physical. I don't go regularly but had been maybe two years earlier. Everything was fine, but Dr. Johnson noticed a small lump on my thyroid. No big deal, most lumps are benign, but it could be cancer, so the next step is an ultrasound.

I went in for the ultrasound on August 10. Dr. Johnson had said that he would be on vacation until September 1, but whatever the result of the ultrasound, we could talk after that. At the ultrasound, the first sign that something was wrong was that the ultrasound tech spent 50 minutes and kept going up and down my neck over and over. The next sign was that she asked me to stay after the ultrasound so that she could check with the radiologist. Just routine I imagined, but then I waited 50 minutes before she came back out and said that they were trying to reach my doctor's office. Twenty minutes later, she came back and said that they had reached someone at my doctor's practice, and that I should see the doctor the next day. "Not the day after tomorrow. Tomorrow."

This was not supposed to happen. Whatever the result, I was going to wait three weeks to talk to Dr. Johnson. All the ultrasound tech would say was that there were "findings", but obviously what she had seen was not good. The next day I talked to a different doctor, Dr. Singh, and she explained that I had a really large mass in my neck, that there was bloodflow to it, that based on the ultrasound I should see an endocrinologist, and that the ultrasound pointed toward the possibility that I had cancer. She also explained that thyroid cancer can be cured and explained a bit about the treatment.

After I had rushed to the doctor following the ultrasound, I got an appointment to see the endocrinologist four weeks later, on September 9. During the next four weeks, my wife and I researched thyroid cancer on the Internet. It turns out that most thyroid cancers can be cured with a success rate over 90%; however, there is one rare kind, called anaplastic, that is almost incurable and will kill you in months. Once I read that, my only concern was that I might have anaplastic thyroid cancer. Finding out that I had another type of cancer would be a relief.

On September 9, I saw the endocrinologist. She took some samples from my neck using needles, a procedure called fine needle aspiration. It's sort of a biopsy, but they get very small samples.
She used four different needles to get samples from different places.

At the end of the appointment, she asked if I had any questions. I told her I knew there were different types of thyroid cancer and asked if there were any indications that mine might be the more dangerous kind. Then she listed about four reasons to be concerned that I might have anaplastic thyroid cancer, and she said the word "anaplastic" each time she gave me a reason. As in, "There is a lot of blood flow to this mass, and that indicates that it might be anaplastic." "It's a really large lump, so that tells us it might be anaplastic."

I was beside myself. Getting anaplastic thyroid cancer is literally a million-to-one shot, but I really did not want to be that one, and my odds kept getting worse.

The doctor called on Friday, September 11 with the results of the fine needle aspiration. I had cancer, but papillary cancer, the most common kind. I was in fact relieved, very relieved. I wonder how many people feel as good as I did when they learn they have cancer.

So now I was pretty sure what I had (the fine needle aspiration test is not considered to be definitive.) Next, the cure.