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Anonymous

There's no way to really tiptoe around how I feel about this article. So I'm going to start off by saying the absolute worse thing you can tell any thyca patient is that they have "the good cancer", "if you get any cancer, this is the one to get", "there's good news about thyroid cancer." The fact is, is that its still cancer. You are still going to have surgery, radiation, and be on pills for the rest of your life because one of your vital life organs has been removed.

There is no cure for thyroid cancer. There is treatment. Surgery and removing cancer is not a cure. That's like me telling you I cured your gangrene by amputating your arm. I-131 kills cancer cells, it does not prevent it from coming back. And the treatment has physical and emotional effects. We're still sucking down poison, even if it isn't chemo.

Yes the prognosis is good. But thyca has it's effects. I would recommend you look at all of the blogs that talk about those effects:
http://dearthyroid.wordpress.com/
http://deathbylettuce.blogspot.com/
http://meganorr.blogspot.com/
http://www.thyroidcancerblog.com/component/content/frontpage.html
Or check out the discussion boards for thyca on planet cancer; it sort of indicates its more than a few isolated cases. http://myplanet.planetcancer.org/group/thyroidcancer

I don't mean to be debbie downer, but articles like this become extremely frustrating to thyca patients. Suddenly we feel like we're blowing things out of proportion. It trivializes what we go through. It doesn't mention anything about the months to regulate medication. Hypohell, that you go through prepping for radiation (when you have to withdraw from thyroid hormones). It says nothing about how studies have show that the psychological pain/depression of hypohell has repeatedly been worse/more traumatic than someone who has had a heart transplant. For most of us there's weight gain, mood swings, heart palpitations etc, because your thyroid is the main organ that controls your metabolism. Imagine going through all that, and people telling you it could be worse, and that your are lucky, and that you have the "good cancer"; or imagine being the person who reads this article and ends up in that minority with pain, or recurrence, or side-effects, and always questioning "why me?"... when there are hundreds of others going through the same thing.

September 1, 2009 - 5:03pm

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