Hello guys,

Thank you for all the kind posts, it is much appreciated. My life has become a complete mess in the past couple of weeks, and today it just got worse.

Thyroid cancer is indeed very treatable. My surgery is scheduled for tomorrow,2/27. The doctors were very clear that this is not a recurrence of my SCC, but an independent cancer. They call it papillary, it is the most common type of thyroid cancer, with very good prognosis if discovered early. They will remove my complete thyroid tomorrow, put me on thyroid replacement hormone and most likely give me the radioactive iodine pill some time after the surgery.

There are two extra complications. One, they did an ultrasound of the neck to look at the possible lymph node involvement so they know if they need to do another neck dissection as well. The ultrasound has shown one suspicious node, very small (5mm), to small to evaluate based on the ultrasound, too small to do FNA on, and according to my surgeon, even too small to remove it during tomorrow's surgery. So I guess we will just follow it which makes me very nervous. The node is interestingly in level IV on the left side ( my tonsil cancer was on the left, thyroid is on the right), so if it turns out to be malignant, we even will not know which cancer it came from unless we can biopsy it. Very stressful.

To make the matters worse, yesterday I had PET/CT and CT scans as three month checkup of the SCC after rads ended. The good news were that, other than the known thyroid cancer, there were no other uptakes in the neck. The bad news were that an ovarian cyst discovered in October last year showed some uptake. Yes, I might have an independent cancer #3, this time ovarian. I need to have some followup ultrasounds as one can not do simple biopsy on the ovary and it is very difficult to diagnose it without very invasive surgical procedures that pretty much constitute the removal of the whole ovary. Needless to say, I am really at the end of just how much I can take. I know it is not cancer till the biopsy confirms it is, but so far every suspicious thing turned out to be cancer. Urgh...