InsaneJournal

The exorcism of the alien egg sac.
So.

Visited the surgeon (also a nice guy, although he looks like he's a transatlantic commercial pilot) today for consulting and discussing the procedure. While there's only a visible bulge on the left side of my neck, a few nodules on the right side popped up on the ultrasound scans and the surgeon is also of the opinion that I should have the entire thyroid gland out just in case they are something to be worried about.

I'm scheduled for noon on Monday, which is nice because I'll get a lot of recovery time before I go back to school. I show up and put on an embarrassing gown, they knock me out and make an incision right above my collarbone in order to do some stuff I wish I could watch but probably can't unless I do an out of body experience, and then I spend the night in a hospital bed while my mom plays with her Blackberry during all the times I'm not conscious enough to kick her out of the hospital to go get a sandwich or something and we go home the next morning. The recovery time varies but I should probably be mostly back in form after a few days, with the only real side effect being that my voice will be hoarse for a few days (unless I'm unlucky and something happens to my recurrent laryngeal nerves in which case I'll be hoarse for up to a year until it heals, but this is uncommon).

I'm not horribly worried about anything going wrong. This particular surgeon's been slitting throats for thirty years and he says he's never had any complications. The only part that makes me uncomfortable is the fact that since I'm getting my entire gland taken out I'm going to be on thyroid hormone medicine for the rest of my life to compensate. While I'm already a lifelong Lamictal junky, there's a bit of a difference between "my brain will do weird and painful things if I stop taking this" and "I will get horribly sick if I stop taking this and probably will have trouble functioning". So...yeah. It's a weird thing to get hung up something so small, but it'll be the permanent part.

Nothing for it, I suppose. I'll just have to stock up before I take any trips into wardrobes or swirly portals.