the drugs don't work, they just make you worse

I don't think I've really written much about having (had) (a relatively low-risk form of) cancer, but it can still be annoying.

I have to take a pill every morning when I wake up. Then I have to wait half an hour before eating. It was supposed to be an entire hour, but I told them that doesn't work with my life.

The dosage of it is pretty high right now, which means that I have trouble sleeping, my heart beats really fast sometimes, and I'm basically always caffeinated, 24 hours a day. I've lost almost 10 lbs. in the past few weeks, which is a lot for me since I normally never gain or lose weight at all.

They made the dose this high not to make me feel better (I felt fine before), but to get my TSH level between 0 and 4. Having low Thyroid Stimulating Hormone is supposed to prevent growth of any cancerous cells that might have been left after surgery and radioactive iodine.

The thing is, I'm not actually sure I really had cancer in the first place. It took them over 2 weeks to make the diagnosis, and they had to send away the slides to the Mayo clinic. I think they kept looking at it, couldn't decide if any cells were actually invasive, and made the conservative diagnosis: cancer. If they're wrong, I just get to have my thyroid out unnecessarily, and if they're right, they could have lengthened my life by a few decades. I'm just not sure they were sure.

I don't actually think it was some sort of medical conspiracy, though. There was an old woman on the ThyCa site who had half her thyroid removed. The other half seemed fine, and then 40 years later the other half turned out to be cancerous and she's now dealing with Real Cancer. That's why I decided to have mine out last year despite my uncertainty about the diagnosis- because I think I otherwise would have gotten Real Cancer in the future. But, they could at least go easy on my dosage of the artificial thyroid hormone, since I don't think I necessarily had cancer at all. I'm going in this week to get it checked out.