I was sent home from the hospital with three bottles of pills: oxycodone, ibuprofen, and acetaminophen. They were white pills in orange plastic bottles, very much hospitals pills: uncoated, difficult to swallow. I only took a few of them. I quickly realized that the oxycodone was much too strong for me. I only used it in the first few days, when I couldn’t sleep. The ibuprofen was also too strong and gave me nausea. After the first week, I went back to my ordinary Tylenol and Advil.

That first week, I mostly slept and ate and slept. By the second week, I could get back to work, and I had to — I needed to finish grading for the semester. Just after my grades were in, I received the final biopsy result. This was the real biopsy, not the fine needle biopsy that had told us the thyroid nodule was “suspicious for malignancy.” Now, post-surgery, they would actually be able to diagnose what had been happening in my neck. The result was: benign. There was no malignancy. I had what they called an “oncocytic follicular adenoma,” which used to be called a Hürthle cell adenoma.

Of course I did some research. One of the funniest parts of this experience has been that I always try to do my research, so when my endocrinologist or surgeon said to me, “According to the most recent studies,” I could say, “Yes, I read those studies,” and I had — in JAMA or on the website of the National Institutes of Heath or wherever. This is what happens when you’re treating a rhetoric professor who teaches research techniques for a living (and whose parents are doctors).

(Medical procedures are highly comical, in a dark comedy sort of way. My surgery only took a few hours, so I went in on a Thursday morning and went home that same afternoon. When I got home and looked in a mirror, I realized that I had purple lines on my neck. There was a thin purple line going down my neck, and then one thin purple line across the middle, and a thick purple line below. There was also an arrow drawn on the left side of my neck. The thin purple lines must have been some sort of surgical marker — I looked those up too, and apparently they’re called SkinMarker. You can buy them on Amazon. They look like the white board markers I use in my classrooms. The surgeon must have used them to plan the incision, sort of the way an artist starts by drawing a series of lines showing relative proportions. The arrow must have been drawn on to indicate which side of my thyroid to remove. The thick purple line was surgical glue covering the incision itself. It was not a dark purple, more like a violet that eventually faded to lilac — a happy color that reminded me of a muppet. It made me laugh to see the little arrow on my neck, while it lasted.) So, as I said, I did my research.

The best and clearest description of what I had comes, unsurprisingly, from Wikipedia, which says that “Hürthle cell neoplasm is a rare tumor of the thyroid” that occurs mostly in women. “When benign, it is called a Hürthle cell adenoma, and when malignant it is called a Hürthle cell carcinoma. Hürthle cell adenoma is characterized by a mass of benign Hürthle cells.” Of course I wanted to know who Hürthle was, even though the medical profession is moving away from naming conditions after people. Wikipedia says that Karl Hürthle (1860-1945) “was a German physiologist and histologist” who received his degree from the University of Tübingen and became famous for his contributions in the field of haemodynamics. While I understand why we might not want to keep the old names of diseases, it sounds much more impressive to say that I had a Hürthle cell adenoma than an oncocytic follicular adenoma, perhaps because of the German name, especially with an umlaut. An umlaut makes everything seem much more serious.

The process of healing is really a process, and it’s psychological as much as it is physical. I had been expecting this diagnosis, simply because I had gone into the surgery knowing the possibility of cancer was about 15-30%, which meant the possibility of no cancer was 70-85%. That’s a pretty large possibility. And I had talked to the surgeon about how I would feel if that were the case. Would I feel as though the surgery had been unnecessary? As though a part of my body had been removed for no reason? The problem is that, according to an article from Oncologist called “Follicular Adenoma and Carcinoma of the Thyroid Gland” (which is the sort of article I would expect my students to cite — no Wikipedia for them!), “A major limitation of fine needle aspiration biopsy . . . is the inability to distinguish a follicular adenoma from a follicular carcinoma.” And, as Wikipedia puts it, “Typically [an adenoma] is removed because it is not easy to predict whether it will transform into the malignant counterpart of Hürthle cell carcinoma, which is a subtype of follicular thyroid cancer.” Basically, without surgery, there is no way to tell whether you’re looking at an adenoma or a carcinoma, and you can’t tell for sure what will happen to an adenoma in the future. They are very unlikely to turn cancerous. But unlikely is not the same as “never happens.”

That did not keep me from bursting into angry tears when I saw the diagnosis, nor having to spend a week working though the psychological confusion of it. Would it have been better if we had found a malignancy? Of course not. Would it have been better if there had been no need for surgery — if we could have known it was a benign adenoma in the first place? Yeah, sure. Should I have taken the other option I was given by the endocrinologist and waited until the fall, then done another ultrasound and fine needle biopsy? I asked the surgeon if it would have made any difference, if we would have gotten any different information then. “No,” he told me. “The FNB would have come back either ‘suspicious’ or possibly ‘indeterminate.’ It would never have come back ‘normal.'” If it would have come back “suspicious” again, I would definitely have chosen surgery, so we would have ended up in the same place. If it would have come back “indeterminate,” we would all have worried that the second fine needle biopsy had missed something.

Here is the takeaway, the hashtag quotation: Life is a series of decisions you make with insufficient information. You can put that on Goodreads.

(Another humorous part of this, for me, is that these categories were created by a team at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland in order to standardize diagnosis, so they are called Bethesda I through VI. My diagnosis, “suspicious,” was Bethesda V. The funny part of it is, when I was a little girl, my mother used to work at the NIH, and I used to go there after school whenever for some reason we did not have a babysitter. So I would play in the halls, and sometimes, since this was the olden days before the current strict protocols, I could even visit the rabbits and mice. My elementary school artwork hung in a laboratory in NIH Building 10.)

(Another humorous part was when I took back all the pills I had not taken to the hospital pharmacy for disposal. “You really don’t want these?” the pharmacist said, as though he could not understand why I would give back free medicine. “I really don’t,” I said, handing over the orange plastic bottles. They were basically still full. Hospital medicine is foul stuff.)

The final part of this process, for now, was a blood test. It came back normal — the right side of my thyroid seems to be humming along, merrily pumping out all the thyroid hormones I need. It doesn’t seem to miss the left side at all.

Of course, I’m still healing. The purple surgical glue has mostly come off, but a strip of it is still sticking to me, as though it does not want to leave my neck. The incision site is a bit hard and swollen. There’s work going on in there — my cells repairing things. It’s a reconstruction site. The scar looks very good — it’s thin, and unless you’re standing close to me, you might not even notice it. It will fade even more over time. Someday, I will have wrinkles there and it will be invisible. For now, I need to treat it with silicone gel and keep it out of direct sunlight, so I’ll be wearing a bandage over it for a while.

The psychological part is harder. I’ve been incredibly lucky with my health. So far I’ve had an appendix and half my thyroid out. Those are the only serious medical problems I’ve had. But this experience has reminded me how fragile and miraculous bodies are. They’ve reminded me that I have a limited time on this earth, and that I’d better make the most of it. Some days that’s a depressing thought, some days an invigorating one.

It is, at any rate, a reminder that I need to do my work, the work that is in me to do, while I can.

(The image is Catherine La Rose by Richard Emil Miller.)