Thychotic

Dear Thyroid,

You are like a psychotic boyfriend who won’t let go.  Nine years later.  That’s bad.

Riddled with cancer and plucked from my neck at age 27, you’ve been incinerator ash blowing in the wind for nearly a decade.  So why do you still haunt my inbox with all of the ‘why, why, why’s’ of our break up?  Here’s a summary of the email I received today:

“Dear Kairol, I was reading a great blog today (a.k.a. crap ass natural healing blog) and read an interesting piece of information (a.k.a. completely unscientific information that uses the word “study” to make it all sounds so empirical) about soy causing thyroid cancer.  I was wondering if that might have been linked to your cancer.  Love, very well meaning family member.”

Thyroid, maybe it makes you feel better just knowing that my family and friends want to understand the root problem of our breakup.  But you see, many people who want to know what caused my cancer ask so that they can figure out how to not get what I’ve got. 

If we truly understood the mechanisms that caused cancer, wouldn’t we be much closer to finding a cure?  I’m not talking an RAI cure, I’m talking the kind of cure that makes you not get cancer in the first place.  We are nowhere near there.  Unexplained cases of thyroid cancer are skyrocketing (it is the fastest growing incident rate out of every kind of cancer in the United States.)

So my friends and family are going to have to shiver wondering if it will happen to them too.  Because the truth is that it just might.  Not cool news.  But when you are facing nine years of thyroid cancer, the truth is less painful than sugarcoating.  And I’m kinda learning to love life that way. 

Ha, I win. 

Kairol

 –(Bio) Kairol Rosenthal is author of Everything Changes: The Insider’s Guide to Cancer in Your 20s and 30s.  On the shelves for almost six months, Kairol loves that her book is bringing together an unexpected readership of empowered patients with myriad forms of chronic illness.