Fresh off my leg trying to kill me just before I turned 30, I showed up for a neck ultrasound because my doctor felt like my thyroid may have been a little weird. A couple months later, I was in for biopsies twice in the same month. Reeling from the comically high cost of coinsurance payments from these experiences, I was set for a right thyroid lobectomy. That was April 5. My first surgery. I wasn’t in a great place mentally at the time, and when I woke up after the procedure, it turned out I had right-side vocal cord paralysis. In the flurry of professional concern about my voice being so far gone it could have been considered miraculous if I made it through five hoarse, low-volume but high-airflow syllables without needing to take a breath, I got a phone call from the surgeon to cover two things: first, he was going to cancel the unpaid amount of my bill from coinsurance because he felt terrible for me, and second, he wanted to schedule a meeting with me.
Oh, also relevant: we didn’t know at the time, but I would go on to discover that I had severe difficulty coming out from under the effects of anesthesia and pain medications; that problem was five and a half years away from identification and treatment. So this whole stretch of time, I was in a prolonged brain fog. I basically only remember taking this phone call in a parking lot at the Laurel MARC station. I think it was sometime in the afternoon. I was not back at work, but able to be out and about.
The days the surgeon was in person at my doctor’s office are lost to the sands of time. I assume he called me to schedule on Tuesday, so maybe Thursday or Friday he would have been able to see me. Either six or seven days after the surgery. I only remember that it was in the first week.
That meeting, of course, was to tell me the lab results were back.
The last ten years have been Something. One, two, or more of them are lost for everyone. For me, I count most of 2013, especially the July to September/October range, as a complete bust. I had backed out of volunteering at the zoo, I was dealing with being incredibly physically drained from six weeks of my ability to restrain any meaningful amount of air in my chest while speaking or exercising, and just generally having a tough time with the diagnosis and treatment. I’m four total surgeries and one radiation therapy down the road and I think things are better, but a lot of this has shaped how I look at the world and I hope I turned out better because of it. Time will tell, I guess.
