Time Flies When You're Dying of Cancer!

I've been kind of waiting to talk about this in any kind of detail, because it's taken a while to get an accurate idea of where things stand, but I think I've got a pretty solid idea of how this is going to play out at this point.

About 3 years ago, I started experiencing tightness in my throat, feeling like there was a weight on my chest, etc. My doctor wrote this off as anxiety, I argued that it definitely was not anxiety and was still ignored and told to take some random SSRI that didn't help me in any way. Symptoms continued mounting, I started developing chronic mouth infections, and very long story short, someone finally thought it might be a good idea to take a look inside my neck. There they spotted a delicious 6.2cm Whopper of a tumor. The prospective surgeon then said "eh, probably still not cancerous" and tried to schedule the surgery 2 months out even after a biopsy revealed that it probably was cancerous. It was so obvious to me that I had been suffering clear symptoms of cancer, so I found a different doctor to do the surgery on much shorter order. They removed half of my thyroid along with the tumor, and in early October it was confirmed that I have follicular thyroid cancer with vascular invasion.

When you have this type of cancer, the "vascular invasion" bit is the part you really don't want to hear. The cancer can't be treated by radiation or chemo, it's generally not possible to see in imaging unless it has manifested in a lot of inflammation or another tumor, and it spreads rather invisibly through the blood. Vascular invasion greatly increases the risk of distant metastasis, making it not a great cancer to have if your doctor is going to be incompetent and ignore its presence for years.

The treatment approach is, and I'm dumbing this down a lot, to basically rip the rest of the thyroid out and try to eradicate every thyroid cell in the body, under the assumption that every thyroid cell is a cancer cell. It seems the test to determine if there are still remaining thyroid cells is to check for the presence of Thyroglobulin in the blood, but until the other half of the thyroid is removed and a mandatory waiting period is observed, this test is rather useless.

Unfortunately, after the surgery to remove half of the thyroid, my body began rapidly deteriorating. I'm having cardiac problems and my oral infections have generally worsened, causing a great deal of pain in my back/lower mouth. There's a lot of anecdotal reason to think the cancer is at the root of these symptoms, but because doctors are hamstrung by their silly methodology, I haven't been able to get a single one to comment on whether any of these conditions might be manifestations of cancer, short of an ER doc who offhandedly said "yeah, cancer's probably spread to your mouth." Now that my cardiac symptoms are delaying my second surgery, however, if indeed the cancer is at the root of the cardiac issues, I may be looking at quite a downward spiral here!

Assuming the cancer has indeed metastasized, and assuming I survive long enough for a doctor to even determine this, there are some drug therapies available. However, the efficacy rates there are kind of shitty. Jumping ahead of the doctors as always, I'm pretty confident that this is the path I'll end up on if I live long enough to even make it onto that path, and my survival will ultimately be determined by some ugly probabilities. There's an alternate drug in trials, but apparently it's not performing any better than the FDA-approved one.

All of this is to say that I could conceivably drop dead at any point here, or I might still be around in a few years, it's hard to say. I figured that either way it was about time to announce my impending death here, because no matter how you slice it, this thing is going to profoundly impact and shape my life in the months to come.

I do hope I get the luxury of being given a clean survival expectation window at some point, but I very much doubt I'll get that. Contrary to how it works in the movies, I think most cancer patients tend to be strung along on hope until dying from some random incidental complication with little to no warning. It's a shame, because we might otherwise have a much higher rate of cancer patients spilling organizational secrets or inflicting severe damage on corporations. I very much encourage the latter and hope to have the opportunity myself!

This medical nightmare has continued to be my focus over the last month, so I haven't got much else to share. If I'm still alive in December, though, I do have something very exciting I'll be sharing in this space! (or I guess someone else will be, if I already ate it)