yes it defintely is

The next appointment came really soon after the biopsy, and it was confirmed that I definitely had papillary thyroid cancer. It was a relief actually to know it was definitely this as the consultant had mentioned the possiblilty of it being some sort of metastasis of a more 'serious' cancer (my words, not his). As you can imagine this gave a whole new flavour to the early morning insomnia.

So the next hurdle was the op. When to have it? Who to do it? Would I still have a voice at the end of it? Would I have a missing muscle in the side of my neck? Would I be on calcium tablets for the rest of my life? Blimey - those pre op warning things you have to go through don't help the anxiety levels. I wanted the consultant I had been seeing from the max facs team to do it, but he was off to Australia for 10 days so I would have to wait til he got back. So began the juggling act of ops and theatre time that is the NHS. I won't go into long boring details, but sorting out when the op would be and who would actually be doing it was one of the most stressful parts of a pretty stressful process, although I was probably projecting a lot of fear - of not being able to speak, of things going wrong - onto it all. So I would like to apologise now to anyone at the hospital that I shouted at or hung up on..... It was actually sorted out reasonably well in the end, with not too much waiting and with the consultant I wanted. It felt like an eternity though. Remember I had been expecting to have this op since the beginning of January and it was now mid March.