In May of 1996, a number of things happened. First, I started to notice my hair thinning out - not enough so that anyone else would notice, but I've always had thick hair, so I made a doctor's appointment to have him take a look at it - I needed to have a physical anyway. Before my doctor's appointment, I managed to contract a pretty seriously nasty flu while in Paris for the Fifth International World Wide Web Conference. When I had my doctor's appointment, I was recovering, but slowly.

As an aside, the doctor told me if I was still sick in a week to call him again. I was still sick in a week, so I called him and went in - I had some kind of secondary bacterial infection (like strep), due to the flu. He put me on an antibiotic. I turned out to be allergic to the antibiotic (I'm allergic to penecillin, and the stuff he put me on was a relative, but usually didn't cause a reaction in penecillin-sensitive patients. Don't I feel special!), so he took me off the antibiotics for a couple of days.

At the end of the week, late Saturday night of Labor Day weekend to be exact, I went into the emergency room because my throat was swelling up! Since they thought it was probably another allergic reaction, they shot me up with antihistamines and various other stuff. It turned out (a day later) I had a large abcess in my palate (the roof of my mouth) - it had probably been caused by the flu or the subsequent bacterial infection.

This part of the story is mostly relevant because the entire time I was in the hospital, the doctors were expressing grave interest in my lower throat. It has always (well, for the previous five or six years) been quite large. They were concerned about the possibilities of a variety of thyroid conditions - such as a goiter or a tumour. My doctor had said (in my physical, which at this point I was too wrapped up in everything else to follow up on) that my thyroid was quite large, and I should make an appointment to have a thyroid ultrasound scan.

So, I went in for the ultrasound scan (five-cent thyroid ultrasound simulation - rub KY jelly on the butt end of a large cold metal flashlight, lie down in a darkened room with a fuzzy TV screen showing weather patterns across the room, and rub the flashlight on your neck while staring at the screen. Isn't this fun?). They found a very large (4cm x 6cm x 7cm) mass encompassing the right lobe of my thyroid (the thyroid is two lobe connected at the middle - it looks sort of like a butterfly), while the left side was normal.

So, in short, I was shipped off to a surgeon, who said there was a chance there was a malignant tumour contained in the node, and little chance that the node would go down with thyroid hormone therapy, so I should have it removed. I had the surgery - he went in and removed the right node, but since it did not look malignant, he left the left node undisturbed (it's possible to live with just one half of the thyroid without medication).

But, unfortunately, the pathology report came back from the lab indicating that it could not rule out the possibility that the tumour was malignant - so, back I went, two weeks later, for another identical surgery, except removing the left node this time. So, now I'm thyroidless, and I have to take a pill every day to replace the thyroid hormone. (This is surprisingly common, apparently.)

There was also some fun with followup work - I've had to have two scans for remaining thyroid tissue, and one radioiodine treatment to remove tissue. This was a little scary - basically, you drink some radioactive iodine (looks and tastes like water), and then sit in a lead-lined hospital room very definitely BY YOURSELF for a day or so. It was very weird, but hey, I've stopped glowing now. :^)

The scans, incidentally, are just a low dosage of radioiodine. They use radioiodine because iodine only collects in thyroid tissue (in fact, the reason they make "iodized salt" is because salt is a staple almost everyone gets - and the iodine is to keep your thyroid healthy, just like putting flouride in the water keeps your teeth healthy). For the scans, you ingest the radioiodine and come back a couple of days later, and they put you under an instrument that is basically a high-rez Geiger counter. For the treatment, the goal is to have the radioiodine collect in any remaining thyroid tissue and irradiate it, killing the tissue.

This sounds scary enough, but the part that is the real drag is that in order for the scan and treatment to work, you have to stop taking your thyroid hormone for a couple of weeks beforehand. This means that your metabolism slows down, and you feel really tired. It wasn't too bad the first time since I still had a fairly significant amount of thyroid tissue left producing hormone, but the second time my energy level was on the floor by the end of the two weeks. Luckily, there's a new procedure that will be out of the FDA approval process before I'm due for another scan that lets you stay on your medication during the scan.