Unfinished business of 2009

We, here at "The Hippo and Snuffles Show" regret to inform you that the new year will be postponed until February 1, 2010. This is because we first must finish the 2009 cancer business before declaring shenanigans and starting anew. And we would like desperately to declare out with the old, but there's just this last little thing a need to do before I can say that: take around 125mCurie of I-131 , you know just to make sure we've gotten all the cancer cells or potential cancer cells that the surgeon may have left behind. The goal is to have no thyroid cells (cancerous or not) left.

This all goes down next week. I've been prepared, withdrawn from thyroid hormone, eating a low iodine diet, which basically means ones prepared entirely by me so to be sure nobody sneaks some iodized salt in there somewhere. This has meant a lot of salads and a lot of cooking. I even tried to make fresh bread with yeast, but it was too cold in our kitchen to get a good rise out of the yeast so the bread was a little dense. So far I'm tolerating the hormone withdrawal pretty well, a little tired, but not so tired I can't cook or function. I'm a little distracted, but I suspect this has more to do with anxiety than anything else.

So next week I go to the hospital to take the therapeutic dose, and get isolated for two days, then spend the rest of the week at a hotel, so as not to expose our 2-year old to the radioactivity, so he won't get thyroid cancer (ironic, huh?). It will be hard being away from my boys at a time when I am so emotionally vulnerable, but I don't see any other way to handle it. I can't just simple stay three feet away from a toddler for a week. Like all this crap, it is just something to be endured and lived through. And soon I will be back.

The stupid thing that makes me a little sad, is that I really wanted to be pregnant right now. I wanted to be finishing my post-doc with the next baby started. I'm a little sad and bitter about the baby I won't be having right now. It's been hard facing the mom's at daycare who are now expecting their second child (6 of the boy's classmates, out of a group around 15). It's been hard to smile and not tear up. In fact I have teared up a couple of times. I keep trying to remind myself, that I still have plenty of biological time, and that sometimes these things that seem like a bad thing on the surface, sometimes they turn out for the best in the grand scheme of things. But it's kind of hard to see that this is only a little set back. 6 months to 1 year after this procedure I can start trying and maybe the timing will be more fortuitous than I can know now. But this is the thing that thyroid cancer and its treatment have taken from me, and I'm sure I'm not the only one who has faced this kind of thing, being that this disease is commonly diagnosed in women my age.

To sum-up, 2009 was a tough year. A lot of great moments, but a lot of difficult ones to. Looking forward to 2010 !which by special decree starts in February this year!