25 June, 2001: Meeting the Surgeon
I had my first appointment with the surgeon who will be removing my thyroid, and we spent about an hour getting acquainted and discussing the procedure. A trim, neat man in his late 40's, he spoke with a soft Texas drawl and drew diagrams of the throat and thyroid on a napkin (I wish I'd kept this to scan). He used this impromptu teaching aid to explain where all my parts are, which ones will be removed, and how he's going to go about leaving intact the bits that need to stay there. After more of my questions about anaesthesia, my odds of getting medical insurance if I were to succeed in changing jobs, and how I was going to feel after the surgery, we got down to brass tacks and the question of scheduling.
My surgery will be this coming Friday, June 29, at 1:00 in the afternoon. Because I don't have a support network here locally, the surgeon seemed to think he'd prefer to have me stay overnight at the hospital, but as it stands right now I'm being scheduled as a day surgery. In the case that I'm released on Friday, I don't really have a feel for a timeframe. I'm guessing some time in the evening, which would be a pain in the arse for my buddy Kyle, who has agreed to chauffer me around.
The way I'm told this whole thing will go down is that I'll go to the hospital on Thursday to get some lab work done and complete the pre-certification that's required by the insurance company. On Friday I'll probably be told to show up around 11:00am (I won't know for sure until They tell me at pre-cert on Thursday). Surgery at 1:00. I'll go home either Friday evening, or Saturday morning(?) if I'm kept overnight.
Initially, I'll be put on a regimen of "temporary" thyroid hormones to get me through the healing stage, after surgery. This is a medication that leaves the system quickly, and after a number of days, I'll stop taking it. The doctor says I'll go for about a week without any thyroid hormones, which will crash my metabolism. As near I can tell, I'll be the human equivalent of a tree sloth, so I'm going to plan on being out of work during this time. The point of this is to make any surviving thyroid cells hungry so that when they give me my dose of iodine isotope, the cells will greedily gobble it up, maximizing the treatment's effectiveness. After this is complete, I'll be put on my long term thyroid medication, and the doctors will begin working to balance my dosage correctly.
The surgeon says that, with a little luck, I should feel well enough by June 19 to make my planned trip up to St. Louis to see [Turtle]. If I don't, I'll lose about $230, as the ticket is non-refundable--but of course, if I'm feeling bad enough to blow off the trip, I probably won't care about the money.
That's all for now.
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