Thyroid Update, Long Overdue

In case anyone was wondering...

The next day, I went to UHS to see the endocrinologist. Dr. G was wonderful--she squeezed me in for an immediate ultrasound, which showed just what the endocrine surgeon predicted: hemorrhage into a cyst. The ultrasound guy stabbed me in the neck with a needle (which was, surprisingly, practically painless) and aspirated a good 10cc of dark blood and debris (ew, gross! but of course I wanted to see it anyhow), which made a huge difference symptomatically, instantly alleviating the pain and slight dysphagia.

He said he would sent off the gunk for analysis, though he assumed it will prove nondiagnostic. The cyst was complex, with some debris and colloid among the blood, and there was only one other little cyst visible, on the other (right) side of the thyroid. And, my thyroid function tests were all quite normal. Best of all, I got a copy of the ultrasounds to show all my friends and put up on my refrigerator to show off my clinical accomplishments as a patient... :)

So I guess that's the end of the story for the time being. The thyroid is still a bit enlarged, but I hope the blood will resorb over time and hopefully not reaccumulate. Both the ultrasound guy and the endocrine surgeon had little in the way of pathophysiology to explain why this happened to me; their best theory was that stress had something to do with it. Stress! I can't believe that after all of my frustration with the lack of mind-body awareness among conventional medicine doctors, and all of my successes in undoing my own stress response, the one medical problem I get is dismissed by multiple clinicians as stemming from stress! Harumph. Personally, I was thinking maybe it had something to do with the contortionist positions I've been getting myself into retracting during surgery over the past few weeks...

Either way, I'm glad it turned out to be nothing serious, and that I was given the opportunity to serve as a teaching tool for medical students all over New Haven. I think more people have now palpated my thyroid than have palpated any other part of my anatomy. Uh, yeah.