This post gets me back to thyca issues. Happily, I haven't had much to post lately regarding my thcya because 1. it's undetectable! and 2. I feel pretty good most of the time.
Not happy with the weight gain at the moment, but if you read the previous post, you can see why Dunkin' Donuts pumpkin muffins were necessary to jump start my day all week. I broke down, telling myself that they are only here for a limited time. Good God are they delicious. Unfortunately, my endo says my body loves to hang onto all the fat I take in, so the muffins went immediately to my waist. Scary. Plan on setting up my new Wii Fit this weekend, and plan to go back to yogurt for breakfast. If the heat is fixed.
The reason for getting back to thyca is my sister's latest mess. She went to see Dr. N a couple of weeks ago for a checkup, and the news was dismal at best. Her thyroid is thick and wrapped around stuff in her neck, and has multiple little nodules. Her body is showing signs of perimenopause, and she's only 38. Her hormones are compeltely skewed and confused, and she feels pretty awful most of the time. She's on a low dose of synthyroid that helps, but not completely. She's also having discomfort swallowing and feels pressure on her throat, which is not a pleasant sensation. Plan is to ultrasound her thyroid again by the holidays and see what's up with the nodules. They were too small to biopsy a few months ago. So Sis is basically going down the same road I went down.
Both of us are devastated to say the least at the idea of never having children--that was not in our plans at all. It's not a total impossibility yet, but it's becoming increasingly unlikely that it will happen. Sis made a dark joke a couple of years ago during my infertility hell that our family tree was a chopstick, and a family member cruelly replied, "No, it's a stump." Little did that person know how cruel or telling that remark would be.
So we got to thinking about why this is happening to both of us. The parallels are too eerie to ignore. While no one can say for sure exactly what causes thyca, there is evidence that childhood exposure to radiation is a major factor. After the nuclear accident in Chernobyl in the 80s, the number of pediatric thyroid cancer cases in and around Chernobyl skyrocketed. There are places in the US with higher radioactive fallout exposure from the 50s, and thus higher evidence of thyroid cancer. In the US in the 40s and 50s, some people were treated with doses of radiation as children to deal with certain medical issues (SIDS, bad acne, recurrent tonsil infections) thinking it would cure them. Instead, the massive doses of radiation directly affected the thyroid gland resulting in cancer later, especially in children under 5 years of age at the time of exposure.
Once you've been exposed, you're supposed to follow up with doctors because you will most likely develop nodules. The nodules usually have a 10% chance of being a thyroid cancer for a normal person. However, if you have been exposed to radiation, you now have a threefold higher risk of developing thyroid cancer. Hmm.
Why am I looking into this? Our dad was hit with cancer of the nasopharynx when he was 30 in 1973. I was almost 5, Sis was about 18 months. I have fuzzy memories, but I remember stories about his ordeal. He was given two years to live since the tumor was inoperable, but doctors used radiation to shrink the tumor as much as possible. He underwent radiation treatments that left him with 2nd and 3rd degree burns on his neck and resulted in 85% hearing loss. From what I remember my mom saying, he was really sick from the treatments and lost a ton of weight. I don't think he stayed in the hospital for treatments, but went in to have them and came home. I read somewhere that during this time, doctors would blast the hell out of the tumor and damage to other body parts was par for the course, since their goal was to get rid of the tumor. Now they are be much more precise and careful about where the radiation goes and how to minimize the effects of it. I'm assuming that there were no restrictions on him during and after his treatments, and that we were able to hug and kiss and be generally close to my dad during this time.
Were we all exposed to the aftermath of his radiation? How else to explain that both my sister and I are in the state we're in?
I had a sheet of restrictions after my RAI treatment, and I'm certain my dose was nothing compared to the months of treatment Dad had.
Sis mentioned this to the endo, and her eyes went wide. I don't know why my mom or I never thought to mention this exposure before. Mom's thryoid was hyper, and she started menopause around age 37. I know that they say that your mother's age at the start of menopause is an indication of when a daughter is likely to start, but her mother had her when she was 41...kills that theory. Were Mom's issues caused by exposure too?
I have some more research to do. Dad's medical files are in a box somewhere, so I can probably find out what kind of radiation he received. He managed to live for 25 years beyond the diagnosis date. Just before he passed away at 55, he was having all kinds of difficulty walking, and turns out he was slowly becoming paralyzed as a result of the radiation. I forget the term they used. However, the doctors were amazed--they said that they rarely saw patients with his condition because most of them were dead within 5 years of being diagnosed. He was a medical marvel I guess.
I think it's kind of ironic--the thing they used to save Dad may now be the underlying cause for our stump. I'm kind of glad that my parents aren't here to watch this play out. They would have been such great grandparents, and it's so sad to think that once we're gone, our line ends. Just ends. That's it. It's all the more ironic since my mom was very into her family history, and we don't really have anyone on either side of the family who is particularly interested in it to whom we could leave it. Oh, that's another post for another day.
I'm chatting with St. Peregrine, hoping he can keep Sis in the percentage of people who have benign nodules and not have it morph into thyca. In the meantime, I'm going to see what else I can find out about this. Maybe I'm way off base, but something in my gut tells me no.
Also, great new book out if you are looking for everything you wanted to know about the thyroid and then some. My brother-in-law sent it to me this past week. It's fantastic! Title isn't very origninal: "The Complete Thyroid Book" by Kenneth Ain, MD and M. Sara Rosenthal PhD. I have books written by each of them separately, but this is the first time they've teamed up. Turns out they married! Their story is in the book--quite interesting. It's a great resource and explains everything in regular English. Oops--guess this is the second edition. It's published by McGraw-Hill, and the copyright date is 2011.
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