What If I'm the Five Percent?

It's funny how passively we can talk about cancer when it poses no obvious threat to us or the people we love.  We use it as a sort of slang word--a word used in casual conversation to epitomize profound suffering.

For the past five years, I've had to get ultrasounds of my thyroid.  Initially, the doctor that diagnosed me with Hashimoto's just wanted a visual baseline of what was going on with my gland (nodules are common in those with autoimmune thyroid conditions).  With every test, there have been small changes, but generally no cause for concern.  My thyroid was inflamed, but it slowly got smaller, and my nodules weren't changing in size (actually, I think one disappeared).

When I went in to pick up my report from this year's ultrasound, I was surprised to see that the radiologist recommended a biopsy.  Not only this, but the nodule had doubled in size since my last exam.  You can imagine my alarm in learning this, when last year the basis for my and the doctors' believing the nodule was benign was the fact that it wasn't growing.

In terms of statistics, only five percent of thyroid nodules are malignant.  However, that rate dramatically increases when various factors are considered, like the patient's age, whether the nodule is solitary, and the nodule's features.  Unfortunately, despite the fact that most nodules are benign, mine meets many of the criteria that make it potentially cancerous, and none of the criteria that indicate it's probably benign.

It's a strange feeling not knowing whether you're part of the five percent.  Of course, immediately there is a lot of fear and sadness.  You troll the internet in hopes of being able to self-diagnose the nodule as malignant or benign (this is impossible without a biopsy).  You ruminate about the fact that you may or may not have cancer.  You spend a lot of time going back and forth in your mind, playing out the scenarios either way.  You realize that you will be okay either way.  Somehow, I think an actual diagnosis is probably a lot less scary than the not knowing.  When you have a diagnosis, you know which mountain you face.  When you don't know, you don't know.

Aside from being emotional (but that's nothing new), the news doesn't exactly surprise me.  I've been so inundated in healthcare and medical treatments during the past few years that I've almost come to anticipate issues like this one.  Yes, I am worried, but less about what will be done if I do have cancer than I am about having doctors and treatment protocols I trust.  A potential cancer diagnosis is terrifying to someone who is skeptical regarding modern medicine and suspicious about most doctors.

Today, I saw a new doctor that told me God made my cells and designed them to know what to do.  She said that I need to start thanking Him for my body and realize that He gave me a healthy body; it's the environment and our food and toxins that have tainted my healthy body.  Her words made me cry, because I so often think of myself as being sickly and diseased that I forget that I didn't start out this way.  It's comforting to know that God didn't give me a lemon from the get-go.  I was given a healthy body that bears the effects of an unhealthy world.

I need to start thinking of myself as healthy with or without a thyroid or some lymph nodes--whether or not I'm part of the five percent.  "For while we live, we are always being given up to death for Jesus’ sake, so that the life of Jesus may be made visible in our mortal flesh" (2 Cor. 4:11, NRSV).  I am healthy because His spirit is within me.