Giving Thyroid Cancer A Throat Punch
Lisa Patrick
Ashland Beacon
When Michelle Salyers’ lymph nodes started swelling last fall, she went to a local urgent care and was diagnosed with a virus. Followed up with an ENT specialist—still diagnosed with a virus. Then, her throat started hurting, and she made a visit to the emergency room. She was once again told that it was a virus. Followed up with an allergist—diagnosis-virus. Being a survivor of kidney cancer, Salyers just knew that something was wrong. She finally managed to talk the ENT specialist into ordering an ultrasound just to “make you feel better.” It turns out that she was right. It was not a virus.
When Salyers got a notification from her MyChart that her results were in, she was driving home and pulled over to read them. She has no idea how long she sat on the side of the road crying after reading that, for the second time of her life, she was going to have to battle cancer. She didn’t bother calling her ENT specialist, but immediately called her primary care provider who “took care of everything.” She immediately ordered a biopsy and a PET scan to see if the cancer had spread anywhere, but it hadn’t. The PET scan showed that it was isolated to the thyroid.
On Dec. 13, Salyers had a complete thyroidectomy. While removing the thyroid, her surgeon found that the cancer had completely wrapped around some of the lymph nodes, nerves, and a muscle in her neck as well as wrapping itself around her vocal cord, which explained why she was “losing my voice at random times” in the couple of months before her surgery. The surgeon scraped off as much as he could and also had to “cut out part of the muscle in my neck” to remove the cancer.
Salyers said that she kept being asked if they had “got it all,” but it wasn’t “that simple.” During the days after the surgery, she was on an “emotional roller coaster” while she waited for the pathology results to come back so she would know what she was facing. Three days following her surgery, she had spilled coffee in her husband’s truck and had a “complete meltdown.” She would have times that she was ok and times when she would just sit and cry.
She now knows that she does have to have one iodine treatment. It’s not the same as having chemotherapy, so she won’t lose her hair but “it isn’t a party” either. She was scheduled to have the iodine treatment done on Jan. 17. She spent the two weeks before on a low iodine diet. This caused more emotional upheaval as she spent “half an hour crying in the salad dressing aisle at the grocery store” before finding a recipe online for a dressing that she could make herself. She could mostly eat fresh fruits and vegetables but could not use lettuce or any other vegetable sold in a bag because they use iodine products as preservatives. She could only buy chicken from White’s Meat Market because they do not package it with salt. She went to a restaurant with her husband and was only able to eat a sweet potato. During this time, she “discovered that a person can live without meat even when they don’t want to” although she had terrible “cravings for hamburgers, French fries, and Giovanni’s pizza.”
The objective of the low iodine diet is to starve the body of iodine so that when the iodine treatment is given, “it goes in and starts killing” any thyroid cells that are left-both normal cells and cancer cells. It requires two doses of thyrogen to be given in the two days before the iodine treatment to boost the thyroid hormone in the body. She took those on Jan. 15 and 16. However, when it was time for her iodine treatment on Jan. 17, she was unable to get it due to a snowstorm in Memphis delaying delivery. It wasn’t able to be delivered on Jan. 18 either. This meant that she would have to start all over. After the initial breakdown, she took advantage of being able to eat real food again by buying a dozen donuts from Jolly Pirate and ordering Giovanni’s pizza for dinner.
The iodine treatment was rescheduled for Feb. 14, Salyers’ wedding anniversary. Since she had to begin the diet again on Jan. 29th, Salyers said that she ate “pizza and cheesecake all weekend” before having to go back to living on vegetables.
For a week following the treatment, Salyers will be considered “radioactive.” She will have to stay in a separate room from her husband and clean the bathroom after every use. She will also not be able to leave her home because she cannot be around animals, children, or women who are pregnant and “can’t take the chance.” She stated that the hardest part is going to be separating herself from her dog because “she’s Mama's baby.”
Though the battle has been hard, she said that she still has plenty to be thankful for. She thanks God for her primary care provider because “she no doubt helped save my life.” Her husband, family, and friends went to appointments with her. Other friends sent her flowers and gifts. Her children, who do not live locally, worried and prayed for her and some of her coworkers “donated PTO so that I wouldn’t have to go without a paycheck.”
The biggest thing that Salyers would like to impress upon everyone is to be your own health advocate. “You know your own body” and “if something doesn’t feel right, be adamant until you feel it’s been checked enough that you are satisfied.”
