I'm hoping I can actually sleep tonight.  Last night my mind was going in circles. I'd fall asleep and then wake up and my brain just wouldn't shut off.  On top of that, I have a one year old who still nurses multiple times during the night. I know he can feel my stress. I think he can sense something is wrong, and I know I haven't been my usual self.

I kind of just want to crawl under the blankets and stay there.  I'm caught between wanting this surgery day to be here and over with, and not wanting it to come period.  I'm scared to death of having surgery.  I'm afraid I won't wake up.  I know, generally speaking, that this type of  surgery is relatively safe.  But I can't shake this feeling.  I've had surgery twice in my life, and both times before I was put under, I had a huge panic attack. I was terrified.  This was when I was 14/15 years old.  I didn't have kids then and I was still so freaked out about it and thought I was going to die.

When you have kids, it's a whole different ball game.  I've caught myself thinking what their lives would be like without me.  It's not that I think I'm this awesome person that they couldn't live without.. it's that I don't want them to live without me...  I can't explain it really.  But the fact of the matter is, I'm scared to death of being put under.  I know I have to do this, somehow I have to find the strength to get through it and hope to hell everything is ok afterwards.

The ENT guy all but confirmed the biopsy as cancer.  He can't officially make the diagnosis of Papillary Thyroid Cancer until he looks at the nodules under the microscope, but the way he put it was that the pathologist wouldn't be so specific if he was unsure.  He wouldn't have specified cells as being suspicious for papillary carcinoma if that wasn't what he saw.

It's a lot to swallow. I've felt like the wind was knocked out of me a week ago.  And then I catch myself trying to downplay it- you know, like the first endocrinologist did? Oh it's just thyroid cancer, no biggie!  Get your thyroid out and you're probably done with it.  The key word is probably.  I can't shake this feeling that the large hospital downstate may have missed this, and this may have been brewing for a long time.  And while I'm hoping with every ounce in me that the biopsy was wrong, my gut tells me that it was right.  I'm just hoping that it hasn't spread.

For years, I've felt that something was wrong.  Only I couldn't get a doctor to find anything. They all thought I was just one panic attack away from a nervous breakdown and being committed. I really hope my gut is wrong, for once.

I'm really scared.  I haven't told my daughters.  I don't even know what my husband is thinking..and I'm caught with this feeling that is somewhere in between panic and like maybe I'm over reacting. It's hard to explain.  I'm finding that I want to just stay home. I don't want to go anywhere. I just want to be with my family.  I find it terribly amusing that now that I'm finally content and happy with my life, this has to happen.