One Week From Today

It’s been nearly ten years since I got rear-ended by a semi.

That set into motion a chain of events that led to me focusing more on my physical health. Scans, specialists, and surgeries — some directly related to the collision, some related only tangentially.

Several months after the accident, my neck was still nowhere close to feeling normal. (Spoiler alert: it never did get back to normal.) I’d been given a CAT scan in the ER on the day of the accident, and my chiropractor ordered x-rays eight months later. After the x-rays came back, she sent me for an MRI for further details on the soft tissues of my neck. The MRI found what she was looking for: a herniated disc in my neck.

The MRI also found a 3cm mass on the left lobe of my thyroid.

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Doctors and Nurses and Others

So much has been going on lately in the realm of health and home-ownership and car ownership that I’ve hesitated to blog about any of it until it’s all resolved. A full story with a beginning, middle, and end makes for a neater and tidier read, after all.

With so much of it unlikely to reach a final resolution at any point in the near future, though, I figured I’d tackle Subject #1: Me. Specifically, my neck and back and overall health (which is generally good, with a few blips).

I’ve mentioned last April’s car accident a few times, but the Reader’s Digest version is that my car got rear-ended by a semi truck, and my neck hasn’t been the same since. I see a chiropractor regularly for my spondylolisthesis, anyway, so adding one more adjustment to my visits wasn’t that big of a deal.

Except my neck never got better. In fact, it kind of felt worse.

To determine exactly what was going on in my neck, my chiropractor ordered a neck x-ray this past December. The results showed that, luckily, nothing was broken or fractured — however, the curvature of my cervical spine has straightened and C5 is slightly out of alignment. Helpful data, but not entirely conclusive.

The next step was an MRI. That happened at the end of January, and I got the results a week later.

The MRI showed that I have a disc bulge between C5 and C6, so that’s what’s causing my constant pain. However, the MRI also showed something else: a 2-3 cm mass in the region of the left lobe of my thyroid.

Wait, what? I’ve got a lump the size of a large grape on my thyroid?
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