Live It: My Thyroid Journey Part 4

Thanks for sticking it out this long.  You can catch up on the whole story.

Part 1.
Part 2.
Part 3.

As with any surgery, you wonder what it will be like.  I had well over a month to think about life after surgery.  I've had other surgeries in the past - liver and gall bladder in 2006 and C-section in 2008.  I can tell you that 2 days after my liver surgery I was sweeping off my front porch.  Again, probably not one of the best decisions ever but I was.  The only downside I had to that surgery was that the pain medication really messed with my mind.  It put me into such depressive thoughts that I was scared to take them ever again.

But what would life without a thyroid be like?  Consulting Google again is not the best idea when dealing with medical issues but I did it anyways.  All I read were accounts of people having their thyroid removed and how their lives were worse than before.  I almost called and cancelled the surgery.

My husband talked me down off the ledge and on Monday, November 9th my thyroid was removed.  We spent one night in the hospital.  How did I feel?

It looked like I had sustained a throat punch from a prize fighter.  My throat hurt so bad on the inside. They had a hard time intubating me, possibly from the size of the left side of my thyroid.  Every movement you make, you have to use your neck so it was pain all the time.  There was a huge, huge hard lump under the incision.  I looked like I had swallowed a shoe.  So I guess you could say I felt like I had been run over by a Mack truck.

Recovery was about a week out of work.  I was weak all the time.  I know it was from about a year of no physical activity before the surgery but it was rough.

Once back at work, I tired out easily.  Everything was slow going.  Until the week of Thanksgiving, that is.  That's when things really went south.

Stayed tuned for the final installment of My Thyroid Journey.