I have never had to experience what it would be like to have cancer. I haven't had to experience having surgery and having my body cut into. I never had to go through rehabilitation for any disease at all. My mom didn't happen to be so lucky.
In 1991 my mother was diagnosed with thyroid cancer. A tumor had embedded itself onto part of my mom's thyroid and had become cancerous. Although the chance of the tumor becoming cancerous is very rare, since the percentage of the tumor becoming cancerous is less then five percent (Statistics 1), my mom happened to be one of the unlucky ones. Almost suddenly without warning my moms life would change for the rest of her life.
She said that she noticed slight swelling and stiffness in her neck that had been constantly harassing her for a couple weeks. This is very common in thyroidal cases (Disease Introduction 2). This she put off because she sometimes gets pains in her neck from the bar in her back, the result of an injury in the 70's. Finally she decided to go to a local physician for a medical opinion. She was diagnosed with Papillary carcinoma, the most common form of thyroid cancer. This occurs in 70 to 80 percent of all thyroid cancer cases (Disease Introduction 3). From there she took the steps from doctors to specialists to surgery. .
Finally she was almost back to normal. The surgeon had removed half of her thyroid and the entire cancerous tumor. The doctors told her that she would be just fine and healthy again within weeks as her body adjusted to having just half a thyroid. She thought she had fought and won against her thyroid, but she was mistaken. About a year had passed when suddenly my mom got very sick. The cause of this sickness: her other half of her thyroid had died. She was back to the surgeon for her last surgery.
She now has no thyroid. She now relies on pills to satisfy her body's needs. This is called Thyroid Hormonal Therapy, one of the most common forms of treatment for thyroid cancer after surgery (Cancer 2).