Sweet, Miraculous Ativan

“I had a hunch you’d call after we got the test results from your thyroid biopsy,” said my doctor. 

I never thought my anxiety would get to the point where I’d be panic-sobbing at my doctor’s office because it became so unmanageable that I wasn’t sleeping and I was barely eating, yet there I was.

I’ve had panic attacks before. I know what they feel like. I’ve been able to get through them without meds, understand them for what they were, and ride them out. It’s only happened once or twice, and there was usually a medical trigger.

Then Miles died. Then two days later I had a thyroid biopsy. Then the following Monday (this past week) I got the call from my doctor: Indeterminate. This means that the extra samples that she took during the biopsy get sent to a lab for further testing and there are only two possible results: benign or suspicious. If it’s benign, monitor the nodules every six months. If it’s suspicious, my thyroid is coming out and they’re doing pathology on it and hopefully (and pretty likely - the rate of metastatic thyroid cancer is less than 5% if the cancer originated from nodules - if you think I haven't been researching obsessively since she called with the initial test results, you are sorely mistaken) there will be no further steps from there. I’ll know around Christmas what the next steps are.

I’m seriously considering having it taken out anyway so that I never have to go through this again, ever. It’s an option that is available to me since I have thyroid nodules, and I think that discussion may be worth having. When she and I meet in 3 months, we are absolutely having that conversation if it doesn’t come up before that.

Then a couple of days later, I met with my Lynch person and waited in the most depressing place ever (let me tell you, an oncology office is just...I can’t find the words for the sadness there. The receptionists were overly cheery, I think to try to overcompensate for the general feeling of malaise - and the look that people give you when you look young and walk into an oncology office made me want to scream that I don’t have cancer, I don't think, and even if I do it's not reproductive cancer so STOP GIVING ME THAT LOOK PLEASE) to sit with her and have her tell me that the only reasonable treatment for Lynch is to have a full hysterectomy. She went over some alternatives, all of which were painful, invasive, would mean that I’d have to be put under, and would have to happen once a year, and recommended none of them except the hysterectomy. I told her about my thyroid issue and that I have to triage. She totally understood and remarked that that’s a lot of medical stuff to throw at a person all at once. She wasn’t quite prepared, I think, when I started crying.

Luckily I could anticipate this tipping point coming and was already scheduled with my doctor for 7am the next day!

“We really opened a can of worms here, but it was worth opening. If you’re going to have any kind of cancer, thyroid’s the one you want. It’s treatable by surgery, and the recovery and long-term remission rate is 99%," said my doctor. I'm not sure if she intended it to be, but I found it both reassuring and not. I expected "It's probably not cancer", but that's not what I got, and it took me a little time to process that. She also said that in order to stop the panic cycle, we have to reset my sleep schedule. I went drastically from 9-10 hours a night to about 4. I also went from eating two meals a day and some snacks to having to practically force one meal a day down my throat. She gave me a prescription for Ativan.

I was...not entirely wild about this idea. “Ativan is addictive!” I told myself. “Is my anxiety really that bad?” I asked myself as it sat on the shelf in my kitchen (which is a super fun game that people with anxiety play - they catastrophize and then when it gets really bad, they invalidate, lather, rinse, repeat.). If I was going to take it, I was going to wait until the weekend so that I wasn’t a total mess during the week more than I already was. Then Friday night came and I figured, what could it hurt? So I took a half a pill.

From a week and a half of struggling to sleep and getting an average of four or less hours a night (less than that even when I found out the biopsy results), I was out in minutes. I’m not sure if I was asleep or comatose, and I woke up sore because I didn’t move all night. I woke up refreshed in the morning and was productive! I was also awake pretty late, which was strange. I also found my appetite, which was both a blessing and a curse because Doritos. But, I was able to be present, I wasn’t anxious about anything, and I just...was able to get out of my own way for the first time in a while. I got stuff done around my house, I was able to focus, I hardly used my phone at all (it's my go-to coping mechanism when I'm feeling super anxious), and I definitely felt a difference.

I’m having such a strongly positive reaction to these meds that I find myself low-key wondering: have I been in a perpetual state of some kind of panic for a long time and it has just gone unacknowledged?

All signs point to yes. But, that's Later Ryan's problem. The most important part is that now that I have one week of waiting down, I feel like I can manage doing this two or three more times without unabashedly losing my shit, and that ain’t nothing.