MaeLyn's Musings

(This is part 4 of a series.  Click here to read part 1 )  Did you know there is a branch in the medical field called nuclear medicine?  I didn't until today. Cool, huh? So a week ago I received a call from my endocrinologist to tell me my Thyroid Stimulation Hormone (TSH) levels were high enough that we could go forward with the radioactive iodine therapy. Shortly after that I received a call from the hospital to schedule, and not wanting to miss my first week of teaching seminary, we settled on today.   So the way the radioactive iodine therapy works (as I understand it) is like this:  The thyroid is the only body tissue that uses iodine. It sucks up iodine (which usually comes as an additive to salt, but also could come from fish or daily vitamins) and uses it to produce hormones and stuff. When the hormones the thyroid usually produces (T3 and T4) get too low (for example, if the thyroid gets removed and all the T3 and T4 it produced before it was remov...

(This is part 3 of a series. Click here to read part 1 )  The couple weeks following my thyroid surgery were quiet ones. I was tired and didn't do much. I wasn't sent home from the hospital with any kind of thyroid hormone replacement, so I didn't know if my lack of energy was because I was recovering from the surgery, or lack of whatever the thyroid usually does, or just because of the 90+ degree weather we were experiencing.  So about the thyroid hormone replacement... When my cardiologist told me I had thyroid cancer and referred me to Dr. Peller, I assumed that Dr. Peller was going to take care of all the thyroid stuff from there on out. It wasn't until just before I was wheeled into the operating room and Dr. Peller asked me who my endocrinologist was that I realized that I needed another doctor! Dr. Peller, as an ENT, would do the surgery and take care of the incision and what not, but I needed an endocrinologist to take care of the hormone balances and stuff. A f...

(This is part 2 of a series. Click here to read part 1 )  On Friday, July 23, after a nerve wracking morning of waiting and with nothing but butterflies in my stomach, Hannah drove me to Good Samaritan hospital in Lafayette, CO. This wasn't my normal hospital and it was a good 20 minute drive from home and I had never been there before, but we arrived safely and pretty close to being on time. (We got a bit lost amongst the many parking lots trying to find the right building.)   When we arrived, there was a lady standing near the front door who took our temperatures, checked my name on her list, and then sent us upstairs to the surgery waiting area. When we arrived upstairs, the lady at the desk there asked for my paperwork and when she discovered I didn't have anything, she sent us back downstairs to registration. There we found a lady who checked us in, scanned my ID and insurance cards, asked a ton of questions about my phone number, my address and SSN, my next of kin a...

 Last month I got to experience my first hospital stay since Peter was born 16 years ago. Here is what led up to it. On Tuesday, June 8th, my cardiologist, Dr. Haffey, informed me that I had thyroid cancer. (See this post , for more info.) He assured me that it was very common and completely curable, but I would need to have surgery to remove the nodules that had been discovered on my thyroid. He would give me a referral for a doctor who specialized in that kind of surgery. The following day I received a call from the office of another doctor, telling me that I had been referred to them by Dr. Haffey, and I made an appointment with him for the following Monday. On Thursday June 10th, Steven lost his job and we discovered that our insurance coverage would end at the end of June. On Monday, June 14th, I met with Dr. Peller. He hadn't seen the test results from the ultrasounds I'd had of my thyroid, but he explained what to expect: I would have surgery to remove part or all of my ...