A Deceptive Disease

I remember as a teenager, I'd often felt off kilter. I was too skinny. My hair never seemed to grow, and neither did my nails. I had dull skin, circles under my eyes, and I always seemed to be sick with one ailment or another. But It wasn't until my freshman year of college that I began to realize that something was seriously wrong. After moving to New York to attend college I became increasingly fatigued. While many people attributed my thinness to my extremely petite stature, my weight would yo-yo as much as 10 pounds in any given month. Even when I exercised or changed my diet, it didn't seem to affect the weight gain or loss. No matter what beauty products I used, my hair and complexion remained dull. I felt sluggish, I couldn't concentrate, I was moody. In short, I was miserable.

Like any teenager, I complained about the way I was feeling, but every symptom was dismissed as either isolated or insignificant. Doctors, and my parents, said that poor diet explained weight fluctuations (I was rebelling against the strict "no McDonalds" rule in my household), my overwhelming tiredness was due to feeling homesick, and my crankiness was hormonal and simply reaffirmed that I was a young woman. Again and again, I was told that everything was fine and that I would eventually outgrow whatever I imagined to be ailing me.

Exhausted and increasingly depressed by the feeling that something wasn't quite right, I found it hard to focus on my studies. I started to oversleep and sometimes missed classes entirely. I was so tired I couldn't concentrate in class, let alone keep track of assignments or due dates. My whole body felt achy. But I didn't know what steps were necessary to find out what was wrong. I felt that my age, or lack there of, became one of the barometers by which doctors decided whether they would take my complaints seriously. In my allotted 15-minute appointment time, I struggled to convey all the symptoms that had been plaguing me. The doctors would usually take blood and inform me that the lab work didn't turn up anything remarkable. 

It took several doctors and nearly three years before I got the right diagnosis at 23: I had cancer. A small node had been discovered on my thyroid earlier that I was assured was benign; it turned out not to be. The day my biopsy came back positive for thyroid cancer I felt a mix of emotions, but, strangely, I didn't feel afraid. All my concerns and complaints were suddenly validated. I could tell all the naysayers that I really was sick after all.

Still, though this form of the disease has excellent survival rates, I wasn't completely numb to the idea that I actually had cancer. I was just trying to look forward to enjoying my future without thinking too hard about the treatments that lay just ahead of me. Ironically, more than the surgery or the radiation treatment I would endure, what I would struggle with the most was the transition back to living a normal life.

The surgery to remove my cancerous thyroid was described to me as a simple procedure. I had one of the top surgeons at New York University Medical Center perform my surgery, and I have to say his excellent work has helped me recover faster that anyone assumed I would have. Once in surgery however, he had to remove more than he had originally anticipated. The tumor had metastasized to my right lymph nodes. The surgeon knew that from a previous CAT scan, but what wasn't known was how much the tumor had affected my parathyroid glands. (The parathyroid glands are four small glandular structures located in extremely close proximity to the thyroid that are responsible for regulating the body's calcium levels.)