Radioactive Mama

Okay here is the story of my summer, and Brandon and the girls' a little more indirectly. I feel that I can now blog about it because I'm not smack dab in the middle of it. I'll try and make it short and sweet. I've had thyroid problems for years which causes me to take medication and get annual thyroid ultrasounds. This year it seems my little thyroid nodules decided to grow slightly, hence the need for a biopsy. Ouch. Not fun...it's just not natural to see someone coming at you with a needle...repeatedly! Biopsy showed basically nothing but they couldn't rule out cancer. Okay, that's helpful. My doctor felt like surgery was needed and we decided to just take the whole thyroid out. Yikes. I had my surgery on June 26th...again painful and unnatural. Isn't it a natural response to try and protect your neck against sharp objects? They actually did find a tiny cancerous mass, so I'm so glad I had the surgery. Ooh...I forgot the most pleasant little tidbit of this whole process -"The Low-Iodine Diet." (spoken with a creepy low voice) I started the diet before surgery and remained on it for 8 weeks. What is the Low-Iodine Diet you ask? The most horrific, torturous diet ever. In my humble opinion. It's a way to starve your body of iodine because the next part of this fun summer is receiving radioactive iodine to kill any remaining thyroid cells left in the body. We'll get to that next. I'm still not done complaining about the diet yet. I couldn't have any dairy, egg yolks, chocolate, anything with red dye (bye-bye Cinnamon Bears and Red Vines! ), basically anything with salt in the ingredients because you don't know if it was iodized salt or not! Ask me when I'll ever eat a corn tortilla or a fruit smoothie again. Ugh! Gross! It took me 7 weeks to get my levels low enough for treatment. That means I had to be tested twice. How do they tell your iodine levels you ask. Good question. With a 24-hour urine test. Yes, that's correct...collect your pee for 24 hours and store the big pee jug in your fridge! April and I are sure my kids' primary teachers probably heard all about that one. Can you just imagine that conversation? This Wednesday I received my radioactive iodine treatment at the hospital in the Nuclear Medicine area. It was pretty easy...I just had to take these two tiny pills. The catch is that I couldn't be around anyone for 2 days and pregnant women and children for 4 days. The girls are all in Utah with the fam and we're going to pick them up TOMORROW. Yay! The treatment made me tired and a little weak, but that's all. I actually started my thyroid meds again today...finally. I hope that I can feel like myself again soon. One of the side effects of everything is my manly voice. My vocal chords haven't healed yet from surgery so when I answer my phone people always think I've been crying or that I've been sleeping. Nope, just don't have a voice. Oh well, if that's the extent of the fallout I'm good with that. I want to thank our awesome families for taking such good care of us this summer. You've helped so much with the girls and we appreciate it tons. Hopefully we're done with the drama for awhile. Great, just jinxed myself! If anyone ever has this problem...I'm your girl. Give me a call and we can chat.