ThyCa Conference - Day One

What a day!

It started with a round table of introductions - people brought together randomly in six different rooms with a ThyCa facilitator.  I sat quietly not wanting to say anything and just listen.  After a bunch of people got it, I was compelled to stand up and say hi and introduce myself only because I kept hearing that people were either living in New Jersey or originally from New Jersey.  I kept thinking - what's in the water in Jersey?

My next session was one on ethics in new surgical procedures.  There are other ways to remove the thyroid besides cutting open the neck - via the armpits is the most popular way.  This process is NOT the way to go (my opinion) for us with thyroid cancer.  I asked if there was a benefit, in the eyes of the surgeon, to open the neck up and see vs. using scopes and such.  The answer was that the surgeon likes to actually feel (with his own hands) the lymph nodes to access the health of the nodes.  I'm so glad I had my neck cut open wide by my surgeon in 1996.  I remember him apologizing to me for having to cut a bit more on the right side to reach the cancer since it was up under my chin.  No apology needed!

From there it was a Lunch and Learn session.  There were none that really jumped out at me, so I decided to sit in with the advanced cancer patients who are using chemo and experimental protocols/clinical trials.  The session was about tools and techniques to handle side effects.  It was informative and humbling...people who have had such blistering on their feet that they've been in wheelchairs...people who are so so so so thin and food moves through them...people who have had such voice issues that it was so hard to hear them speak...and a loving husband who buried his wife earlier this year but came anyway to help her legacy live on.

After that I crashed the hypoparathyroidism session.  I say "crashed" because I have hyPERparathyroidism, not hyPO.  But there I learn that the symptoms and issues are so so so similar...keeping calcium and Vitamin D in proper balance, bone health, brain fog issues, etc.  Again humbling since people there had a parathyroid hormone level of zero.

After that I was tired.  So much information - "Conference Brain" is what we call it.  I took a nap and went back for the evening social.  I spent some time talking to Nick Isenberg, the Producer of the movie The Magic Bullet.  I bought some tickets (fund raiser) and had some snacks.  Then they announced the winners and I won the Samsug Galaxy tablet!!  HOORAY.  Gary Bloom mentioned donating it back to ThyCa (he was kidding) and I said "No way, I donated [thank you Bob Jerauld] a couple hundred bucks worth of wine for tomorrow night's auction."  We all laughed.

Tomorrow - another day!