Dear Praying Friends,
We are on our way home from Jacksonville, FL. We hope to get through Atlanta, GA before we stop for the night.
The doctor called early this morning and shared some great news – Susan’s cancer is “Stage 1, and the surgeon feels confident that he was able to remove all of the thyroid (there were 4 areas of Papillary Cancer total – 3 in the right lobe and 1 in the left lobe). The doctor wants us to wait at least 6 weeks before we come back to Mayo for more testing (to allow Susan time to heal). We are scheduled to come back on February 3rd to have an Ultrasound of the thyroid area and to check for active thyroid tissue. If there is no active tissue, then we can be assured that the surgeon removed all of the thyroid. If there is, then we will take the next step, which is Radioactive Iodine Therapy. The doctor was careful not to give a false hope, but she was pretty confident that we caught it in time. The Lord already knows what February holds, so all is well.
As we think back over the past 2 years of doctors appointments, blood tests, scans, and procedures; it is really a miracle that this cancer was found. Many doctors have manually checked my thyroid and done numerous blood tests, but none of them ever mentioned nodules/tumors. It wasn’t until we went to the Mayo Clinic that the nodules were found. The biopsies from the Mayo Clinic tested benign both in March and in November. However, when the outside lab tested the biopsies, one of them came back 40% suspicious in March, and a different one came back suspicious in November. These suspicious results are what led us to consider a thyroidectomy. The fact that my thyroid has not functioned since 1995, and that I have Hashimoto’s disease, were also factors in this decision. As we talked with the surgeon, we really felt a peace from the Lord that this was the route to take. And this is interesting, when the thyroid was removed, the pathology report on the nodules came back benign – it was the thyroid tissue itself that was cancerous. We are so thankful that God led us to have the entire thyroid removed. God was all over that decision. The cancer would have been near impossible to find without the removal of the thyroid. We want to thank each of you who have prayed so fervently for us. Your prayers were definitely felt throughout this whole process. God has used so many of you to be an encouragement and blessing to us!
Reaching Families for Him,
Tim, Susan, and Rachel Vermaas
