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"and all the science i don't understand... is just my job five days a week." --elton john, "rocket man"

Thursday, December 03, 2009

i feel it in my fingers, i feel it in my toes

in seven days it will be three months since i had surgery. it's weird, sometimes i forget that even really happened. but on days like today i have the lingering reminder that i really did (do?) have cancer, and i really was cut open, and a part of me truly was removed.

all of the studies i have read--and i have read many--say that less than 1% of people have permanent parathyroid damage after thyroidectomy. and most of these people were operated on by an unexperienced surgeon who didn't know what they were doing. when you look at it that way, all the odds are in my favor.
and yet the studies also say that normal calcium levels returned within a few weeks, and parathyroid hormone levels normalized within 3-6 months. i am very nearly at 3 months. and nothing for me is normal.

so what do i think about all of this... do i think that my endocrinologist is just a pessimist who tends to see the negative and is being overly hasty in diagnosing me as permanently broken? do i believe my surgeon who tells me that it can take up to a year-maybe more-to really balance back out for good?
i would like to.
and most days i continue to believe that any God who can make the entire world and everything in it is certainly able to fix my three (remaining) tiny parathyroids.
but it is hard to be positive and believe these things when it feels like my veins are pumping soda instead of blood; when my hands and arms and legs continue to go numb randomly; when everyone else i have talked with got better so much quicker.

one day all of this will either be fixed or be normal. and i promise, one day i will stop talking about it.

it's weird to think about all of the crazy shit that's happened these last few months: being held together with staples, eating hundreds of tums, swallowing the big black radioactive pill-you know, having cancer...
anyway, i'm boring myself again. so that's all for now.

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