Medical bills...bills..bills...

Finally, almost all of my medical bills from last year have been corrected. The big issue wasn't with any of my ThyCa related doctor visits, but more with all the PT visits I had. I had a total of 30 visits, 10 over the 20 allowable. Will be glad when all my PT invoices are adjusted for my health care provider.

Next week I see the eye specialist for my leaky left eye. Wonder what kind of surgery will be needed to fix it. My boss's husband had a procedure done last December for a similar issue. Either I get this fixed or buy stock in Kleenex.

And here comes some more cancer

Thankfully, not my own. Sadly, someone else in my family is joining the club. My mom's lung mass is still there. She awaits a PET scan to check for lymph node involvement and to confirm it has not spread outside the structure of the lung. My brother says that since surgery is an option, it is probably still in the early stages.

She seems to be taking it well, so far. She only told her prayer group, but has decided that she didn't want to tell anyone else outside of our immediate family about it until after she has the PET scan and sees her pulmonary doc again. I seem to be taking it pretty well so far, also. I almost broke down in the bathroom at CostCo, but then I thought to myself, "my mom isn't dead. she has lung cancer, but her doc seems pretty confident that it can be removed with surgery. sure it sucks that she has to have surgery. it sucks even more that she has cancer. but she isn't dead. she can still live a long life after this. i don't have a reason to cry." I'm here for my mom. To help her through this journey. To keep her in good spirits. To let her know it is Ok to cry whenever she wants to. She is going to make it through this.

Non-small cell lung cancer. This is the type of lung cancer that non-smokers get. Non-smoking Asian women have a higher incidence of getting this type of lung cancer because of their exposure to second hand smoke. Unfortunately, my grand-father was a smoker.

ThyCa group meeting - February 7, 2012

It has been several months since the last post I did on my local support group meetings. We have had a few speakers (endocrinologist, surgeon) already. This evening we had a pharmacology student speak to us about our meds. It was interesting and of course informative. We had a lot of questions, so his 20 minute presentation was stretched out to 90 mins!

When he was describing the mental effects of being hypothyroid, and he said "mental dullness", which was not on his slide/handout. I had to stop him to make sure I heard him correctly. Gave me a good chuckle because I had never heard of thyroid brain fog described this way. "Mental dullness". Nice.

One of his slides had a table with the different medications. "Liotrix", sold under the brand name 'Thyrolar' was listed by itself. I have never heard of either. Liotrix, he explained, is the synthetic form of desiccated thyroid, or 'Armour Thyroid', which is pretty much pig thyroid. Since it comes from an animal's thyroid, and has both T3 and T4 in it. Armour is marketed as 'natural' thyroid medication because it comes from a pig, not chemicals. For some, Armour works wonders. The controversy is in the fact that it is hard to regulate exactly how much of T3 v T4 is in each Armour pill. What I found interesting is that he said it actually does have chemicals in it, which is necessary to bind it together into a pill form. So it is 'natural' thyroid plus some chemicals to keep it stable. Got it. Anyway, Liotrix is a drug that has both T3 and T4 in it (1:4 ratio). It is not a very common drug prescribed because our bodies automatically convert T4 into T3. Most don't need the extra T3. Others, like myself, need additional T3 to clear up issues, like afternoon fatigue, or thyroid brain fog.

Among the food interactions to avoid right before or after taking our daily T4 dose, he listed 'cottonseed meal'. I asked what that was, and he didn't know. So I Googled it: animal feed. Doubt I will ever eat animal feed for breakfast, so I don't see this as a problem.

We have another speaker at our meeting next month - a radiologist who will go over the finer points of the radio-iodine ablation treatment. We are also hoping to get a pathologist. Mary, one of the other co-facilitators, has done a fantastic job coordinating all of the speakers for our meetings. Me on the other hand, nothing. It is getting to the point where I send out the meeting reminders the Friday before the meetings, so I feel like a bit of a slacker. I guess the most important thing is that we all show up for the meetings.