The First Hint

I started to wonder if I should take thyroid medicine to help with my less than normal thyroid function so I thought I should find a thyroid specialist to answer that question. I was surprised to learn that it is not easy to get an appointment with an endocrinologist. I had to start by finding one that took my insurance and the ones that had been recommended were not on my insurance plan. But I found a wonderful man at UCSF, Dr Kenneth Woeber who is a Thyroid specialist and he agreed to see me once he looked over my blood test results. I wondered if I should have been worried when his office called me the day after I sent my blood tests to schedule an appointment and he was able to see me the very next day. That was the very first of a series of hints that I probably should have been worried. When I saw the charming Dr Woeber, he asked me in his South African accent “why are you here?” and I told him that I have Hashimotos and I wondered if I should be taking thyroid medicine to make sure my body got the benefit of a functioning thyroid and he said that before we answer that question, let me examine your thyroid to see if there is anything else going on. That surprised me since I had no expectation that there could be anything except for that annoying Hashimotos. I should explain that the end game of Hashimotos is Hypothyroidism which is what my mom has so I never thought that my thyroid problems extended beyond Hashimotos. I just thought that I caught my problem earlier than mom caught hers and that; hopefully, I would be able to manage mine before I ended up with the hypo problem. As Dr Woeber examined my thyroid, he mentioned that my thyroid was enlarged – about 1.5-2 times as big as a normal thyroid. I thought that was weird but I was not really worried. He asked me 4 times if it hurt when I swallowed. And he recommended that I get an ultrasound just to make sure everything was ok. He said that he didn’t feel anything but in hindsight and with more information, I am pretty sure that he did feel one of my two cancerous nodules. Of course he did not know that they were full of cancer but I am pretty sure that he felt one of them because one of them was calcified (hard like a marble). And the reason I believe that he felt it was because a few weeks later when I met with the surgeon she told me that she could feel one of them. Anyway, off to get an ultrasound and I was not worried - my feeling was more "well, that's curious". I figured that it was a good idea to check it out and that I was doing the ultrasound just because my thyroid was enlarged - not because there might be a problem in there.