More comments from Trish, written in the spring 2005, on her experiences with Surgery, Chemotherapy, Radiation, and the Feeding Tube Top of page Bill’s Storyīill’s Fight is the story of my husband, Bill, and his opponent, Anaplastic Thyroid Carcinoma (ATC). I don’t know what it would have been like if I did not have it. It was a real lifesaver because I lost 35 lbs. PS – I also want to add that within the first week of IMRT/chemo treatments, I had a feeding tube put in. Please let me know if there is anything else that I can answer for you. I’ll never know why I am one of the lucky ones, but while I am still on this earth I will be here to help each and every one of you get through this. I am here to watch my two little girls grow up, who are now four and five. I still have a problem with swallowing some foods and I am still very thin due to the high dose of levothyroxine that I am on and will be on for the rest of my life. (If I had just insular cancer, they would have treated me with EBR, nuclear radiation, and chemotherapy because insular is a cross of fast-growing and slow-growing thyroid cancer). In November 2002, I had nuclear radiation to take care of the papillary cancer and the insular cancer. I missed one the week they put the feeding tube in and one another week when I had a fever. I was supposed to have 7 chemo treatments with Doxorubicin once a week during radiation. I had one treatment a day, 5 days a week, for seven weeks. I started treatment at the beginning of May 2002 on an IMRT (Intensive Modulated Radiation Therapy) machine. The surgeon said that I had to see the absolute best in the oncology field to make sure it would be obliterated out of my system. Because of the anaplastic piece, they treated it as if it was all anaplastic, for obvious reasons. They also found two more nodules that were papillary. The major nodule was 90% insular and 10% anaplastic. When the hospital re-did the pathology on the biopsy, it was found that the tumor was made up of insular cancer (another rare thyroid cancer) (3/1/02).Īfter the surgery, the final pathology showed that I had negative margins (meaning they got the whole tumor) and many types of thyroid cancer. Less than a week later (2/27/02) he had me in surgery because he did not like the pathology reports or the answers that I gave to his questions. I was blessed to be sent to an experienced thyroid surgeon. So I got on the Internet and after talking to an Endocrine Surgeon in NYC on the phone, he referred me to one in Connecticut (which is where I live). I wasn’t getting good vibes from the oncologist I went to see nor the surgeon I was referred to. Again my doctor told me it was no big deal and there was only a slight chance it could be nasty especially considering my age at the time, 33. The biopsy showed that it was thyroid cancer but not which kind. He said it was probably no big deal but sent me on for tests, ultrasound and fine needle biopsy. In cleaning up, I found a lump in my neck. To learn more about how and for what purposes Amazon uses personal information (such as Amazon Store order history), please visit our Privacy Notice.In January of 2002, my 9-month-old daughter sneezed on me with a mouthful of food. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie Preferences, as described in the Cookie Notice. Click ‘Customise Cookies’ to decline these cookies, make more detailed choices, or learn more. Third parties use cookies for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalised ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. This includes using first- and third-party cookies, which store or access standard device information such as a unique identifier. If you agree, we’ll also use cookies to complement your shopping experience across the Amazon stores as described in our Cookie Notice. We also use these cookies to understand how customers use our services (for example, by measuring site visits) so we can make improvements. We use cookies and similar tools that are necessary to enable you to make purchases, to enhance your shopping experiences and to provide our services, as detailed in our Cookie Notice.
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