Hi folks
Week 1 of the low-iodine diet is complete. With two weeks off the artificial thyroid hormone and a week of changed diet, I'm starting to slow down somewhat, so I'm more or less off of work from this point in.
Tuesday we went into the General for the first round of radiation testing: the imaging scan and the uptake test. On Tuesday there was a bit of a mystery happening, as they told us they were only going to take two images with the radioactive tracer in me -- then they immediately took three! They then decided that they wanted an all-around series of higher-resolution images, and a CT scan, so we had to wait for a time spot on the machine to get those done. Through all this they told us there wasn't anything to worry about.
When we went back on Wednesday for the uptake test, they showed us the results of the imaging sequence. I have some kind of proto-thyroidal duct down the back of where the thyroid used to be, probably a remnant of my pre-birth development. Since I don't have a thyroid any more, this tissue is trying to act like a thyroid and so lights up the same way that a thyroid would. The doctors have decided that this tissue is at low-risk for turning cancerous and will very probably be killed by the ablation process anyways. So nothing to worry about.
So the next step is the ablation on Wednesday afternoon, followed by the full-body scan the following Monday.
