You know it can’t be good when the doctor is doing the exam and her comments escalate from “crazy” to “insane” to “unbelievable.”   She did an ultrasound today and counted 10 nodules on my enlarged thyroid.  Three of them are much larger than the other seven.  She said she’s never seen so many nodules in one thyroid before.  So—I’m exceptional!  : )  Or an anomaly . . . I think I’ll take exceptional.

We talked for a while and decided on a first course of action.  I’ll have a radioactive iodine scan within the next week.  This will give her a better idea of which nodules to biopsy besides the three largest.  She said normally she’d biopsy all of them, but this isn’t normal.  Each biopsy requires 3 – 4 samples, and she thought 30-40 sticks to a relatively small area of my neck were too many.  Whatever biopsies she does won’t happen until January.

The thyroid’s shape  is often likened to a butterfly—hence, the butterfly image.

Image courtesy of Billy Alexander