My Health – an update!

How it all started!

I have an underactive thyroid gland – Hashimoto’s Thyroiditis to be exact – most likely caused by having diabetes in past family members, I was diagnosed with this at age 25 but could have had it earlier than that. It was found because I was insistent with my then doctor that something wasn’t right and I pushed him to do every test imaginable to find it, and eventually he did. There was no cancer causing it, the link was to past family who had diabetes.

I’ve had all the tests done on it, and I need regular blood tests to monitor the thyroxine levels and get my medication adjusted accordingly but overall it’s functioning, albeit artificially. The endocronologist who I was dealing with when he felt it said there is hardly anything left, my white cells have all but destroyed it thinking it’s a disease but the medication taken daily for the rest of my life will fill that void. No big problem, I’m so used to this now.

A New Doctor

I went to the doctor, a new doctor in fact, as I was suffering from depression and my sister was so concerned that I was getting far too low in my moods, she could see the warning signs that things were getting so bad she feared for my life. I don’t know that I was getting that low, but maybe I was. She took steps to drag me to her doctor and get me the help I needed. This doctor (a female) is wonderful, she’s very much into holistic healing, western medicine and alternative medicine both feature well in her treatments. I liked this because she wasn’t about to try and just pump me full of synthetic drugs. She decided that as many health problems can affect our moods she wanted to check my thyroid (which can affect moods) as well as other things, so she sent me for blood tests. Never a fun thing for me as my veins are wonky, little spindly things that pop out from under the needle, it’s a stressful thing for me to go through and I don’t “bleed” well either.

The results came back, thyroid levels a bit too high, so she’s been lowering them slowly, my white cell count which I thought was low wasn’t, I found it was a little too high (that can indicate different diseases and other issues), but this is when she discovered there were problems with my liver. More blood tests to check those areas. We discovered Epstein Barr Virus – glandular fever/mononucleosis but there were still questions about the liver.

Fatty Liver Disease

She sent me for an abdominal ultrasound, thinking that I may have gallstones. None were detected but it did show up I have a liver disease. The liver disease I have is called Non-alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease (NAFLD). It basically means that fat was depositing itself in my liver and making it impossible to actually lose any weight, among other things. A second ultrasound showed crystals forming in the wall of my gallbladder which may end up being gallstones at some point, but we’ll worry about that later. My new doctor wanted to take a closer look at everything because still the results weren’t to her liking, she knew something extra was going on so she organised for me to have an Abdominal CT Scan with contrast (Iodine drink for the intestinal/bowel area and the injection for the organs). They revealed nothing new in my abdomen BUT they showed something that wasn’t expected.

A Nodule in My Left Lung

Naturally the bottom of the lungs are caught by the abdominal CT scan and the radiologist called my doctor who promptly got me back in, there was a nodule on the bottom of my left lung that “might be cancer”. I wasn’t overly surprised by that news since I had a history of smoking BUT it’s still not something you want to hear, it’s the old thing “those things always happen to someone else, not to me”, but it looked like I’d been playing Russian Roulette far too long and I may have got the bullet.

This was on the 23rd of December, they were closing for the Christmas/New Year break and as they wouldn’t be back until the 5th of January she wanted it checked into asap. She suggested I go to the Hospital Emergency department with a letter she wrote asking them to follow it up. They weren’t too pleased with the whole idea of this because they figured I’d be seeing different people and there wouldn’t be the continuity of care if I followed this plan. I wasn’t overly fussed with spending Christmas in hospital, though I would have if I had to.

They did a standard chest x-ray which showed nothing and checked all my vital signs and then asked me if I had a backup? I asked “a back up what? plan? lung? generator?” The registrar said “do you have a back up doctor you could see while she’s away so you’ve got the continuity of care?” Ummm, yeah there’s my old doctor that I see, and if I can’t get into see him, there are others there that I could see. Okay, I could go home. They wrote my other doctor a slightly sarcastic letter pushing him to fix it all! OMG!

Xmas Eve and My Other Doctor

Well, being the optimist I am, I was sure that even on Christmas Eve, I’d manage to get in to see my old doctor (he’s so popular it’s hard to get an appointment so quickly with him) and sure enough I got in early. I took all the info with me and he said “right, let’s see if we can get you a chest CT scan today and have the results back today”.  He phoned the radiologist and got me in an hour later, so off we dashed across to the other side of town. The odd thing is it’s in my Sister’s run (she’s a FedEx courier) and while sitting, waiting for my appointment, we’d been just saying, “gee wouldn’t it be funny to bump into her in the area”, no sooner had we said it, she walked in the door to do a pick up! There were lots of stunned looks of “omg” “what are the odds?” haha but the whole experience seemed to be getting things to happen when we asked for them!

I had the CT scan and it was a fun experience, he couldn’t get a vein this time so it wasn’t with the contrasting Iodine but never mind, we had a laugh because I asked him “is it in yet?” then said “perhaps that’s the wrong thing a woman should ask a man”, we fell about laughing over that one, and then he said something later, can’t remember what it was but it was equally as funny and naughty but it lightened the mood, when I was looking at a possible cancer. I kept in mind that everyone (I had three opinions) said “it MIGHT be cancer”….that translated to me as “it might NOT be cancer too”, so I clung to that.

So where is this thing?

We got home with the films but the doctor is always sent the report, so we sat and waited for the phone call. He called me later in the afternoon and said “they haven’t sent the report through even though I marked it urgent and I just called them but they’ve shut for the day”. DAMN DAMN DAMN! I have to worry about this over Christmas! :(

You know what? I wasn’t about to let it spoil my Christmas, I refused to, because it MIGHT NOT be cancer! We had a great Christmas day, it was just my parents, sister, myself and my husband and that’s all I wanted on THAT day. We enjoyed our day but you could feel that little cloud above us all silently, even though nothing was said. But we did the best with what we had and I can say it was one of my best Christmases ever!

My current doctor (the old one) was due to have the following week off, but he’d authorised one of the other doctors to get the results and phone me on the Tuesday after Christmas. That was a tense wait.

On the morning, the first thing I did was phone the radiologist to find out if they’d sent the results through and she said “yes, we sent them through for download at 3:15pm on the 24th of December!” Grrrrrrrrrr that meant that the STUPID receptionists hadn’t downloaded them for MY doctor who I spoke to after that time.

I called the doctor’s office and spoke to one of the receptionists and explained the situation and asked her to get someone onto this quickly, after all it was a potentially big thing and my doctor wanted me to know as soon as possible. She told me “well, we’re busy all day so we’ll try”, I told her it better be sooner rather than later as I’d been up all night worrying!

The results – good and not so good

10am came and the owner and head doctor of that practice called me with the best news ever “it’s NOT cancer!” wow, the relief that flooded over me. No cancer BUT there IS a problem, in fact there are two problems there. It’s all in the left lung, my right is clear. It turns out that my smoking history has left some damage and I have some emphysema, plus something else that they can’t tell what it is yet but I have reactive lymph nodes in the centre of my chest so they need to find out what they are reacting to.

When my doctor (the old one) got back from holidays (this last Tuesday) I went in to see him, he’s given me a referral to a respiratory specialist, I’m to phone to make the appointment this morning and if they won’t fit me in within two weeks I’ve got to phone him and he’ll call and force them to see me in that time. He explained more about the issues but said the specialist will obviously do more testing, perhaps a MRI and PET scan to delve deeper and find out what this questionable thing might be. I’m obviously not out of the woods yet but at least so far we’re ruling things out and finding out what can be fixed etc…

I then went back to my newer doctor that same day as she wanted to know the outcome, so I gave her a copy of the report and she said that a lot of the blood tests she’s been doing have good information for the specialist, they help rule out things to look at and give him things to check into, so she then sent me for another blood test to add a couple of other possibilities to make his job easier to nail down the areas to look at. I get those results tomorrow.

So….this saga will be going on for a while, in my next post I will explain how the liver disease is treated and with the emphysema, as I no longer smoke, it will just stay where it is but I can now work on building up my lung capacity again. And hopefully this other thing going on, won’t be too difficult or dangerous and can be also fixed. Keep me in your thoughts or prayers, it’s just really horrible to know that on the outside while I don’t feel too bad (apart from tired and lack of energy and low breathing capacity) inside, my body seems to be having a hard time.

BTW, I’ve also had some close calls with cervical cancer, so getting a pap smear in about a week’s time and will also get a mammogram too just to rule things out, I don’t like surprises much!

Thanks for all your support through this, no doubt you’ve not heard the last on all these things but the great news is I do NOT have cancer!!! :D

P.S. The glandular fever has gone now too…got that good news the other day, it means Stu and I can be intimate again!!

Tags: cancer, emphysema, fatty liver, lung, lymph nodes, nodule