My Thyroidectomy Journey

Nuclear medicine sounded fancy, eh?😃 Before I was diagnosed with thyroid cancer, I knew nothing about nuclear medicine. It turned out that nuclear medicine could be used in both diagnosis and treatment. More about nuclear medicine use in diagnosis and treatment, you could read it here . In my case, my oncologist recommended me to take radioactive iodine (RAI) ablation, a radiation therapy in which radioactive iodine is administered to destroy or ablate residual thyroid gland, including cancer cells that take up iodine. As I mentioned on previous post, my primary hospital did not have nuclear medicine facility. So, on a Saturday afternoon I met dr. Yustia Turi SpKN, a nuclear medicine physician from Rumah Sakir Kanker Dharmais, also a colleague of dr. Bayu. dr. Yustia explained to me what  RAI was, the side effects, etc. At that moment, honestly, I had not decided if I would take ablation or not. I was still weighing the side effects, also the fact that  I should not ...

I came back to the hospital for my follow ups a week after I was being discharged. First, I headed to Oncology Center. Without further due, I was brought to Procedure Room and a moment later, dr. Oggy came in to check my wound dressing. "The wound looks good, do you have any concern we should know about?" he asked. "Nothing doc, but when I took shower this morning, the wound dressing started to fell off and it feels itchy." "That's okay. Since the outside wound already healed completely, we're going to leave it like this, without dressing. What do you think?" "Uh, okay" I then reached my phone and tried to look through my phone's camera. The wound looked nasty. As if he could read my mind, "We will give you something, hopefully it could make the scar less visible." Not so long after, dr. Bayu came in. He brought my pathology report in his hand. To summarize, the result came back as: - Papillary thyroid cancer...