Thyblog

realsparkles:

Okay, I know people are all worried about Brooke having cancer, and I am aware that cancer is a serious subject, but let me tell you a little bit about thyroid cancer. It’s the easiest cancer to treat. If you get thyroid cancer there’s like a 99.99% chance that you’re going to survive. If you get…

Part of me didn’t want to respond to this because I understand you’re just trying to be reassuring but, its comments like this that make thyroid cancer patients shut themselves away and feel guilty for worrying about their future. I didn’t talk to anyone about my experience for 5 years because I didn’t feel like I had a right too, because I had the “good” cancer. That’s why I have to respond, I hope you understand.

Thyroid cancer is easy to treat depending on the type you have, but a lot of patients have their cancer controlled rather than removed, note I don’t say cured because no thyroid cancer patient will ever really be cured, the best you can hope for is remission. How do you say in remission? By taking a higher than normal dose of thyroxine, doing this for a prolonged period of time can cause a number of health problems the most serious of which affects your heart.

If you get thyroid cancer it can spread to anywhere in the body, the most common places being the lungs, bone, skin and lymph nodes.

After thyroid cancer treatment you’re not fine, you may survive, but your body has still gone through a massive trauma and mentally you have to cope with everything that’s happened to you.
Adjusting to thyroxine is also pretty awful. First of all you have to get the dose right, if you’re too low you become very cold, your heart rate slows, you’re exhausted, your muscles and joints ache like you wouldn’t believe, you become depressed, your skin dries and becomes itchy and irritated, your speech slows, you struggle to remember simple things, and the list goes on. Then if the dose is too high (this is something thyca patients have to learn to live with) you become anxious, too hot, your hair falls out, you get muscle and joint pain (sorry guys there’s no escaping this!), you become weak, exhausted but you can’t sleep, you shake, your heart rate increases and you get palpitations, you struggle to catch your breath, you feel nauseous and again the list goes on and on. I’ll never forget the nights I’d wake up screaming and crying from the pain.
In addition to all this your follow up is for life and you have to live with the knowledge that cancer could back any time which makes you incredibly paranoid about every illness.

Thyroid cancer IS something to worry about and no patient should feel like they don’t have a right to worry because some types have a good survival rate, and let’s be honest, statistics don’t matter if you’re the in the % that doesn’t make it.