Shoes, Ships, and Sealing Wax

241.0*

Well, I saw the endocrinologist. Apparently I have a 4-cm mass on my thyroid.

Ok, no, I got a little more out of the visit than that. Mostly, the endocrinologist thinks we should skip the biopsy and go straight to surgery. I can follow his logic: the mass is so big that there is an increased chance of a false negative, so why bother?

I see the surgeon on September 2. Since most surgeons like to do surgery, I expect the surgeon will concur on the surgery idea. I'm not so wild about it, but that's because I'm a giant wuss. (I'm not wild about the mass in my throat either. Am I a whiner or what?)

I really had to press the doctor about the ultrasound. Every time I asked, he just went back to the limitations of biopsies. I finally said "I do realize that pathology is the only definitive way to diagnosis this, but was there anything at all that you could tell from the films?"

So I got:

The mass is big.
The mass is solitary.
The mass is solid.
The mass has a regular border.
The mass doesn't show areas of calcification.

Those last two are good, but the first three might knock my great 95% odds back a bit. From what I've read (and doesn't a week of constant Googling make me an expert?), you want your thyroid nodules to be small, fluid-filled cysts that show up in little clusters.

So.

So.

So, how about those Nats, huh?

*That's the ICD-9-CM code for what I have.

Posted by Nic at August 20, 2008 04:04 PM | TrackBack