Composition on A MOMENT WHEN YOU FELT SCARED
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Answer+Explanation:
I was working by myself one night in the piano store, no one else there, when I had this annoying spasm feeling in my throat. It happened on-and-off every now and again, but something about that time made me want to investigate further. I felt like I had a lump in my throat. I went to the store's only restroom, washed my hands, and poked my finger along the back of my tongue. I felt a lump. My blood ran cold.
I'd had childhood radiation therapy to that exact area. I was 20 years on. It's practically common knowledge...radiation plus time equals cancer.
I was more frightened than I ever knew I could be, and I imagine it's the same kind of fright when anyone feels a lump, except I had the experience of cancer treatment to know the hell I was potentially in for.
I went to my doctor, who thought it might be a tumor. He referred me to the ENT who had cared for my family for some time (my brother is partially deaf). The ENT was brashly confident that it could be handled. My tongue was poked and prodded. He thought he could excise the lump easily, and surgery was planned. As part of the preparations, they decided to test my thyroid levels, which came back low. They knew my thyroid was damaged by radiation, so they decided to do an uptake study to check on it. There was no uptake at the normal spot in my throat, and they had to keep moving upward.
Meanwhile, my ENT bought a new motorcycle. He drove it home from the dealership with his wife and sons in the car behind him. On a back road, he skidded on gravel and crashed, dying in front of his family. He had his papers from work that day in a leather bag on the bike, and among them was the unopened report saying that it was not a lump in my tongue, but my thyroid. I had a lingual thyroid. However, because of the circumstances of his death and the completely-understandable state of his widow, we didn't get the papers for quite some time. It was before electronic records.
(Incidentally, this was the second of my doctors to die in the span of a few years. I had a family-practice specialist I liked very much, also young and confident, who rolled his new sportscar and was decapitated. I began to feel like a curse.)
We already knew that the surgery was off, but then we had the new problem of the lingual thyroid to deal with. I was sent to University of Chicago and had a short and horrible stretch of time I hope never to experience again. During this time, they attempted to do a biopsy of the thyroid, which extended like half a ping-pong ball out of the back of my tongue. They couldn't go in the normal way, so they would hold up the ultrasound wand until they felt they saw it, drop the wand, hold the spot with their finger, and make a blind stab with a four-inch needle. All of this without anesthesia. I ended up choking on my own blood and had to be suctioned. I walked in, but couldn't walk out. They had to wheel me back to the office. The test was inconclusive, because my radiated flesh was "baked hard like a salami" and they couldn't get any appreciable sample of cells.
My thyroid and I, much like my spinal cord tumor and I, have been in a standoff ever since. I take thyroid hormone to make up for what it doesn't do, since it halfheartedly secretes hormone into my mouth instead of my bloodstream. Every once in a while there's weirdness from it and from the radiated tissue. This winter, I had an extended coughing jag and felt an explosion of nerve-pain in my tongue. It started a dystonia episode in which I could barely speak or swallow, and it still hasn't completely gone away. I have an ENT and a specialty endocrinologist who are trying to keep an eye on it.
Sometimes, when my ENT is feeling the back of my tongue, he will offhandedly comment to his assistant about a "growth" or a "mass", and I will have a moment of panic thinking that he is talking about something new. He reassures me (even after this last episode) that the thyroid appears unchanged. But it's something I will be worried about forever. I have a lot of bad thoughts about an agonizing death, being unable to swallow, or to avoid choking. That feeling of being suctioned is still really fresh in my mind.