Insurance

Check it out, total billed $54,360. Total they actually get $6511.00 (12%). What a health care system... what if I didn't have insurance? Could I go in and say "I'd like to pay 12% of my bill and call it good? HA!

Next Steps

I'm feeling just fine now. I've been off of all pain killers for a few days now and the staples are now medically ready to come out. They'll be extracted on Tuesday and then I'll have to rely on my scars for a conversation starter :). I'm spending the weekend with Mom in Buena Vista. I just got back from a run. The replacement thyroid hormone has actually given me more energy than before! The surgery site got a little agitated but no big issue.

I visited the Oncologist last week and now everything's scheduled for the mop up nuking operation. On October 6th I'll go take a tracer dose of I-131. The next day I'll sit under their scanner and any remaining cancerous thyroid cells will be illuminated. Based on the number and size of these hot spots they will administer an appropriate kill dose of I-131 which will kill any remaining cells. I'm told to be a little tired afterwards... not bad! I'm also to avoid contact with people, especially children after the therapeutic dose for a few days.

Dr. Book told me that the Endocrinologist would be the doctor responsible for this. Since I haven't been able to get an appointment with her (Mrs. Dr. Book) I'm happy to have Dr. Markus pushing forward. There may be some conflict and intersection of roles during the hormone replacement tuning... we'll see.

So I've got staples in my neck, a giant scar, I can't feel the skin at the surgical site (yet), I have to take a pill full of nuclear waste , I still have to get settled into a dosage of thyroid replacement, yet all I can think was : that wasn't so bad :).

Why can't it be Halloween?

I could really work with this:

Save Clicks

I added a box on the right side "subscribe via email". If you put in your email address and click subscribe and then jump through the hoops it will send you any blog posts I made for a given day the next morning to your email inbox. That way you don't need to figure out RSS readers and you don't need to check to see if I've posted anything. If you want to comment click on the title of the post in your email window and it should send you to the blog where you can comment normally (I think).

Well Enough to be Bored

I'm starting to get bored of recovering. That's a good change from a few days ago when I was too uncomfortable to get bored. I've had some road bumps since my last post.

I came home from the hospital in the afternoon on Friday the 27th. I took a nice shower and reduced the gore factor a little bit by washing off the dried blood around the incision. That night I was only managing about an hour of sleep at a time. I'd wake up and have to take pills or just wake up. At about 3AM I was woke up and noticed that all of my extremities were tingling. I went to use the bathroom and while I was standing my leg fell asleep and I felt like I was going to collapse. I laid back down and all of the toes on my foot seized up, locked curled up. I woke mom up and we went to the ER.

The Penrose ER is a completely different story than my experience at the rest of the hospital. You are greeted by not medical staff, but a security guard. Then after explaining that you feel as if you're about to black out and have a heart attack you're handed a clipboard to fill out your billing information. We were in the waiting room for about 20 minutes before the nurse had us come back to explain the medical reasons for being here and take vitals. When they took my blood pressure with the cuff my hand involuntarily seized up into a claw... It's scary to watch an appendage go into factory test mode. Mom fell when a wheeled chair slipped from under her the nurse became very concerned about if she should drop everything and fill out an "incident report".

We went to an ER curtained area.

• They got me hooked up on an IV and a timed automatic hand cramping machine. 
• They took 5 vials of blood
• The results came back and the doctor didn't know what was going on (he wasn't the sharpest tool)
• They called my surgeon's on call doctor who said to administer IV calcium and admit for observation
• They gave me an IV bag of calcium and wheeled me up to a room.

Well that was easy and should have taken an hour right? Wrong! Each step was initiated by going over to get a nurse to figure out what the heck was going on. The entire process took 5 hours, most of that time I was pretty sure I was about to have a heart attack and the nurses were at their station gossiping.

The next day Dr Book's doctor on call, Dr. Knox came by to check on me. He asked when the last time I'd take the oscal was. Wha? Never heard of that med before... It turns out due to a mistake somewhere along the way a critical calcium supplement prescription didn't make it into a bottle on my counter. Since my parathyroid glands are taking a break the supplemental calcium is the only source that keeps my muscular and nervous going. Whoops, so sorry, go buy some of that.

Dad came back into town to help since mom had been up all night with me. When I got home after a few hours of laying on the sofa like a zombie I noticed all of the tingling returning. I called Dr Knox who basically said take as much calcium as it takes to make it go away. I was already on a schedule of taking 18 of these big calcium pills per day! It did work though.

Sunday cold symptoms started developing I couldn't talk, it sounded like I was speaking under water. Swallowing was hard because of the junk in my throat and swollen ex-thyroid area around my trachea. That night going to bed I had a fever of about 101F. We were wondering if I had an infection and should go to the hospital again. I staid home though, waking up at about 30 minute intervals trying to clear my airway as much as possible, popping some pain killers, calcium and then trying to go back to sleep.

Tuesday was the breakthrough day. Since then I've been mostly just on ibuprofen for pain and I'm no longer just sleeping all day like a cat. My energy level feels good. I'm taking my temporary thyroid replacement : Cytomel. The stuff's like speed. After I take it my heart starts beating faster and I get an energy boost. 

So now I'm getting bored and writing excessively long blog post! :)

Alive

Hello everyone. Posting from my phone now in my hospital room.

Surgery took about 5.5 hours yesterday. I didn't get a ton of sleep last night but everything's starting to come back online. Dr Book says everthing went really well. I'm walking up and down the hospital floor in this very stylish gown. It's a good thing there are no small children around because I think a look at my neck would have them screaming and running away :)

I'm on the oncology floor at Penrose which has private and recently remodeled rooms. The nurses here are outstandingly nice and helpful.

I'm back on solid foods, swallowing feels a little weird for now. I really had no desire to do anything but lay in bed until they gave me the thyroid pill. Now I'm feeling fine... as long as I keep my head pointing straight forward :). I'm getting some painkiller by IV every 6 hrs. Last night I did ask for one round or morphine (which was allowed once an hour!). Dr Book says its my call on leaving today. I might just go ahead and stay another night to be safe. I'm detached from all the machines currently which is nice.

They removed a good bit of tissue and all the lymph nodes in my lower neck. He says the thyroid itself was barely swollen and they had to kind of guess at the cancer site. It's all going to pathology now. Dr Book called mom and dad from surgery twice to say how it was going. 2 major possible complications are out of the way because I can lift my shoulders and speak fine. My calcium levels are a bit low which is common immediately after traumatizing the parathyroid glands, but the doctor thinks they should be ok in the long run.

I'm doing well all considered!

The Big Day

Everyone's been so kind to call and email. You're all the best friends and family I could ever want!

Well last night was the my last meal for a while. I went out with Mom to the Blue Star Restaurant and ate a nice meal. We coincidently saw Liz briefly... hi Liz :). No eating today, surgery is late : 1:00 and we need to arrive at the hospital at 11:00.

I was reading all these blogs about people having no thyroid hormone after surgery and feeling 100 years old because of it so I fired off an email with a bunch of questions to my surgeon Dr. Book. He got back to me this morning with a detailed reply to my questions chiefly that I'd be given a prescription for a thyroid replacement hormone with a short half life immediately after surgery. This drug is quickly removed from the body so it's ideal in the time before radioactive iodine treatments which require "hungry" thyroid cancer cells to show up well on a scan. I was really impressed by his thorough and quick reply.

My Endocrinologist will be Dr David Book's wife Dr Lori Book. She'll get me setup with the radioactive iodine treatment and the thyroid hormone level tweaking. I called and got an appointment this morning and the scheduler said the earliest appointment was for 9/22!! I told her I was having surgery today and she put me on the cancellation call list. She think I should be able to get in much sooner.

I'm still not worried, let's GET IT DONE

Oh 1 more thing: mom and I went to a "genetic family councilor" appointment yesterday. The main take away that I got was that she said that "1st degree relatives" (something like that -- meaning a parent had thyroid cancer) should be extra careful because since in the Faith family it's been in multiple generations there might be a heritable element to it which isn't typical with Papillary Thyroid Cancer. So physical exams for everyone! I also read that there's a blood test for something called Thyroglobulin that can be an indication of thyroid cancer. Maybe they can screen using that blood test? Anyway, get a physical!