Dr Jessica Gosnell

When I met Dr Gosnell, I liked her immediately. She is young, smart, she was wearing a Nike Fuel band and she is a thyroid specialist. She felt the calcified nodule immediately. She told me the risks of surgery: 1. Internal bleeding – she wants her patients to stay at least 6 hours after surgery to make sure that isn’t happening. If it is, they will know because your neck will swell up. And if it does happen, they need to get me back into the operating room to stop the bleeding. 2. Nicking the parathyroid glands can cause low calcium levels and prompt the need for taking higher doses of calcium. 3. Infection after surgery. 4. Stress or damage to the laryngeal nerve which is the size of dental floss and runs behind the thyroid. There is a 5% chance of damage to this nerve and if it is damaged, the voice will be compromised. This nerve also moves around as you breath, swallow, sneeze, eat, drink, etc. I liked her, I trusted her so surgery it was. Oh, and I asked her if she would be taking out both nodules and she let me know that she would be taking out the entire right side of my thyroid rather than just the nodules. She said that the nodules were like marbles in jello. You can’t just take the nodules out – you have to take the whole half of the thyroid out. And she also made it clear that she would not take out both sides of the thyroid unless she knew for sure that it was malignant while she was in surgery. They would do a quick pathology during surgery but the more comprehensive pathology test results would be complete over the next 7-10 days.