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I-131 Treatment
By Michelle | July 5, 2008
First and foremost, THANK YOU for all of your continued prayers, positive thoughts, emails, phone calls, and well wishes for our family over the past week!! The positive energy carried me through the last 5 days and Jeff and I are finally home. The girls are doing OK; Sarah Jo is having a rough time missing us this last day, so please keep her in your prayers as she makes her way back from Utah and into our arms tomorrow afternoon. The first 2 days after treatment were rough, but now I’m feeling really, really good and eating as much as I can get my hands on (after 11 days of that low iodine diet, I vowed I will NEVER skip breakfast again!!).
Overall Tuesday went really well!! My scan came back very positive, the doc only saw thyroid tissue where he was expecting to see it, right at the base of my neck. That means that our surgeon appears to have gotten all the cancer in the lymph nodes with the surgery, which is a huge relief!!! There is no possible way that any surgeon can remove all the thyroid tissue in your neck with surgery alone (the thyroid gland is meshed in with lots of vital organs…so it would be much more damaging to dig around in there rather than just trying to kill the remaining tissue (cancerous or not) with the I-131 treatment). Logically in my head, I NOW realize that in order to see how successful the treatment was this past Tuesday, we will need to rescan and do more blood work in 9 months…I was just not prepared to hear that I will have to come off my thyroid meds and go on a low iodine diet ever again. Especially not again in 9 months…so that part of the discussion with the nuclear med doc on Tuesday was really overwhelming for me. The other part of the conversation that was very difficult is the possibility that I “might” need another I-131 treatment in 9 months depending on what the results of this treatment are. This is where we need your continued prayers!! There is this hormone called thyroglobulin http://www.mythyroid.com/thyroglobulin.html and it is the hormone that all thyroid tissue makes in your body (whether the tissue is cancerous or not). The nuclear med doc wants this thyroglobulin number to be below 2 or basically none existent so that we know for sure that there is no thyroid tissue left in my body. My current thyroglobulin level is 46 and that number needs to be below 2 in 9 months. He said that there is a possibility that in order to get to 2, I might need one more I-131 treatment, but we will not know that until we check again at our follow up next spring.
You know that I believe in miracles and I definitely believe in the power of prayer, so it would mean SO much to me and to our family that you continue to pray for me and for our family that this one treatment will be so effective that no additional treatments will be necessary next spring. I’m moving forward with that positive attitude and energy in mind and am looking forward to enjoying the rest of the fun summer that we have planned with the girls. I’m counting the hours until they are both in our arms again.
Thank you for all of your love and prayers, they mean the world to us!
Happy July and we will update the website soon of Sarah Jo’s adventures in Utah and the big princess birthday party!
Love to all!!
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