Others take paid leave, and I went to work with cancer at the age of 28

After this year's physical examination report came out, half of the colleagues in the office were diagnosed with thyroid nodules. At the same time, 3 of my friends have been diagnosed with thyroid cancer this year.

Touching our neck, it is almost difficult for us to feel the butterfly-shaped endocrine organs on either side of this trachea.

The thyroid gland is the largest endocrine gland in adults, located in the front of the neck, reddish-brown, and H-shaped. (Photo/Picture Worm Creative)

However, it secretes thyroxine diligently every day, silently playing an important role in regulating metabolism and promoting growth and development for our body. Often it is not until it has a lesion that many of us begin to realize its existence.

According to the latest cancer report data from the Journal of National Cancer Centers in China, the overall incidence of thyroid cancer in China is 14.65 per 100,000 people, but in the 16 years from 2000 to 2016, the incidence of thyroid cancer in women has increased by 17.7%.

The increase in thyroid cancer in women is the most significant of all cancers. (Photo: Cancer Incidence and Mortality in China, 2016)

Fortunately, thyroid cancer is one of the most cancerous cancers with a relatively good prognosis, and the five-year survival rate of most thyroid cancer patients is above 90% as long as they are treated promptly. Therefore, it is also known as "happy cancer" and "happy cancer" in the community.

But no one is not afraid to hear the word "cancer", and no matter how mature the treatment for thyroid cancer is, everyone pays a terrible price when it comes to confronting cancer head-on.

We spoke to young people diagnosed with thyroid cancer and doctors in thyroid surgery.

Kobayashi is a 27-year-old financial practitioner

During an induction check-up in August 2021, the doctor reminded me that my neck was swollen and recommended that I go for further examination.

I remember that on the day of the examination, the doctor who gave me the color ultrasound gently reassured me that there was nothing wrong with the operation, and I believed it. But when he handed the report to the attending doctor, he said that there was a possibility of cancer.

The "solidity", "hypoechoic", "calcification" and "rough edges" shown by color ultrasound results are all malignant signs. (Photo/Photo provided by the interviewee, "Guidelines for the Diagnosis and Treatment of Thyroid Cancer (2022 Edition)")

The attending doctor continued to ask me if I was usually flustered, and I said yes, when I was scolded. The doctor was puzzled, so I glanced at my father, who was accompanying me.

During the time of the diagnosis, our family experienced a huge change, and family members quarreled with each other. My dad and I had a particularly strong conflict, whether it was my friendships, national exam results, or job choices, we could never agree with each other.

I washed my face with tears every day, slept only 3 hours at night, and was diagnosed with mild depression. Now that I think about it, staying up late, being stressed, and depressed, I am full of all these buffs that may cause thyroid lesions, so I am not prone to illness?

When he was hospitalized before the operation, Kobayashi photographed a beautiful sunset. (Photo/Photo provided by the interviewee)

I was diagnosed with papillary thyroid cancer, which is a relatively mild type of thyroid cancer with the best prognosis, but because the cancer cells invaded the entire thyroid gland, the doctor gave a total thyroidectomy with lymph node dissection.

I couldn't accept that my body was about to lose an entire organ, but I quickly convinced myself that if the cancer spread again in the future, I would be the one to blame.

When I heard the doctor say that I was going to have surgery, my father, who had always been proud, rarely avoided my eyes, and when he left the hospital, he also walked in front of him. Only in the car home, he was silent for a long time and said, "It's nothing, just cut it." ”

Then cut it. At least on this matter, we are rarely on the same page.

After the surgery, my life seemed to come to an end. Not only because the endless quarrels at home were finally put on hold, but also because I lost my voice for the next month and a half.

The thyroid gland is surrounded by abundant blood vessels and nerves, and surgery may affect the function of the recurrent laryngeal nerve and vocal cords, and transient loss of voice is one of the complications. (Photo/@头颈医学影像联盟)

I'm a very vocal person, and the feeling of not being able to make a voice is even harder than having surgery. But I still insisted on asking my friends out for dinner, and they were chatting, and I could only try to keep up with their conversations with my breathy voice and fast-paced fingers.

Looking back on this experience now, I still feel in a trance: I was just a week into the job, and I immediately called in sick leave for two weeks to go to the hospital, I lost my thyroid gland inexplicably, and I had to take medication for the rest of my life, and suddenly a faint scar appeared on my neck. Also, an ambiguous person who had a good conversation before suddenly stopped replying after learning that I was sick.

What a nonsensical time.

Xiao Yuan, 23 years old, is a master's student

One month after my first year of graduate school, I was diagnosed with thyroid cancer.

Before that, I had never heard of the disease, I didn't know much about the thyroid gland, and I never imagined that I would be involved with "cancer".

However, the thyroid ultrasound reports issued by the two hospitals told me that the tumor was 3 cm in size (most tumors were no more than 1 cm), and the malignant grade had reached a relatively high grade of 5, and the doctor said that the entire thyroid gland must be surgically removed.

On the afternoon of the day she was notified that she needed to be hospitalized for surgery, Xiao Yuan photographed a very strange cloud, and she thought, maybe this is also some kind of sign. (Photo/Photo provided by the interviewee)

When it first came to face cancer, I was relatively calm. Probably turning fear into curiosity, I kept checking the information until I saw that its five-year survival rate was as high as 90%, and I was a little relieved.

The surgery went well. Now, two years later, apart from taking medication every day to replenish thyroxine, my body doesn't seem to have any sequelae.

There are many people on the Internet who say that this disease is "cancer-loving", and as a graduate student majoring in sociology, I think this statement is very ridiculous. Any major disease will not only bring physical pain to patients, but also bring far-reaching "pain" to the whole person's external, psychological and even social relationships.

During the preoperative preparation, Xiao Yuan shaved part of his hair. (Photo/Photo provided by the interviewee)

In my case, the pre-operative preparation required that the hair around the ears and the back of the neck be shaved off, and then braided on both sides. I had to accept this weird hairstyle and it wasn't until more than half a year later that it was back to the point where it wouldn't be noticeable.

After the operation, I had a 15cm long scar on my neck, and I always felt that someone would look at my throat when I walked on the road, and it was difficult to lift my right hand for two or three months, and my face was a little numb...

And in the face of these "pains", I can't blame anyone, and few people can empathize with my pain.

Today, I have taken the "pain" effect of thyroid cancer patients as one of my research directions, and I have interviewed 18 patients so far.

Most of them are women between the ages of 20 and 40, from all walks of life, who accidentally discovered their thyroid lesions during a routine physical examination, and most of them attribute their illnesses to the stress of work and life.

(Photo/"Thirty Only")

Thyroid cancer does have a milder impact on the body than other cancers, and some lucky patients can even stop taking the drug now, but the impact of the disease on their lives is far from disappearing.

Doctors define whether a person is cured based on the five- or ten-year survival rate, but when a medically "cured" person returns to society, even if he appears healthy, he can never be regarded as a normal person.

Unemployment, failing to pass the physical examination at work, being broken up, being divorced, and worrying about whether they will relapse are all real experiences that some patients have suffered, and the most common attitude is just to sigh and say "understandable".

But I don't want to understand. How can it be enough for people to just be cured? We still need to live well.

Mr. Wang, aged 30, is a construction practitioner

In September 2020, after a whole year of staying up late and working overtime until two or three o'clock every day, and I became emotionally irritable, I was diagnosed with thyroid cancer through a physical examination at the unit, when I was 28 years old.

In fact, I have never believed in the phrase "thyroid cancer is a happy cancer", and I privately believe that this sentence is not a comfort for many patients, but a misleading.

When one of my patients was diagnosed with thyroid cancer two years ago, he listened to the online statement that "thyroid cancer develops very slowly, so you don't need to care about it", so there has been no treatment. When she was re-examined at the hospital last year, her cancer had spread to her lungs and she even needed open heart surgery.

In "My Hometown and Me", my cousin was diagnosed with a thyroid tumor a few years ago, and he was reluctant to spend 30,000 yuan on treatment. (Photo/"My Hometown and Me")

But I myself went to the other extreme - because no one around me had ever heard of this disease, I found a random hospital on the registration platform, and I just wanted to cut out the tumor in my body as soon as possible.

It's just that there is a price to be paid for rushing to the doctor when you are sick. My tumor grew on the right side, and I could choose to keep the left thyroid gland without removal. However, the doctor at that time did not confirm the surgical plan with me before the operation, but directly performed a total thyroidectomy for me under general anesthesia.

Despite this, the first surgery did not clean the nearby lymph nodes, and I was even able to feel the remaining nodule on my own after the surgery.

I insisted on doing a color ultrasound every month, and I didn't find this nodule for a year. It wasn't until the source of the number was tight that he had to hang up a special number that the doctor finally discovered the "fish that slipped through the net" hidden in the depths.

Color ultrasound sometimes also does not allow you to see deep nodules. (Photo/Unsplash)

Later, I found a thyroid specialist and had a second incision to cut it out.

The good thing is that I feel safe at last, but at the cost of scarring and sequelae from the incision, I now often feel stiffness and numbness in my neck, and the perception of the right half of my face has become dull.

After this illness, our whole family lost their sense of security. Even after returning to normal life, my parents could no longer rest assured that I was alone in Beijing, and I gave up the habit of planning for the future, thinking that I could live one day at a time and earn one day.

(Photo/"Tokyo Tower")

I threw away all my thyroid cancer-related records early, and it wasn't until a year after the surgery, when I found out that some of my peers had started to get the disease, that I really started to accept that I had cancer.

Everything that makes me happy now is simple. For example, I had been drinking milk every morning for 28 years when I was interrupted by the pills that I couldn't take with milk.

But recently I've discovered that if I'm lucky enough to wake up at 4 a.m., I'll be able to take my medicine early, and I'll wake up with milk again. The milk in the morning is really happy to drink.

Xu Bo is the director of the Department of Thyroid Surgery, Guangzhou First People's Hospital

Having worked in thyroid surgery for 10 years, I have been in contact with more than 3,000 thyroid cancer patients.

In recent years, the number of young patients under the age of 40 has indeed increased. At present, more than 60% of the 15-20 radical thyroid cancer surgeries are performed by young people aged 20-40 years old, and the ratio of men to women is about 1:4.

In fact, as human survival continues to increase, the detection rate of any type of tumor is increasing. The thyroid gland is a superficial organ, and even small lesions can be detected by routine ultrasound diagnosis. Therefore, since thyroid ultrasound was used in routine physical examinations, the detection rate of thyroid tumors has increased significantly.

Between 2000 and 2016, thyroid cancer had the largest increase in incidence of all cancer types. (Photo: Cancer Incidence and Mortality in China, 2016)

According to the origin and differentiation of tumors, thyroid cancer is divided into papillary carcinoma, follicular carcinoma, medullary carcinoma and undifferentiated carcinoma, of which the first two are collectively called "differentiated thyroid cancer", accounting for more than 90% of all thyroid cancers, and the five-year survival rate after surgery is also very high - which is why some people will summarize thyroid cancer as "happy cancer".

However, such a generalization is not accurate enough, because undifferentiated carcinoma is the most malignant of all malignant tumors, with a very poor prognosis, an average survival time of only 7-10 months, and there is no effective treatment plan.

At present, the incidence and mortality of anaplastic thyroid carcinoma are increasing nationwide. Fortunately, the incidence rate is very low, and about 500 thyroid tumor patients are admitted to our unit every year, and the number of undifferentiated cancer cases can be in the single digits.

The medical community has not found a factor directly related to the incidence of thyroid cancer, but pollution, radiation, and irregular lifestyle may all have a certain relationship with the occurrence of tumors.

(Photo/"Weather Forecaster")

As for the argument that stressors and being "angry" are not entirely unreasonable. The age of onset of thyroid cancer is 20-40 years old, and young people at this stage are prone to various pressures in life and work.

When the human mental system and endocrine system are out of balance, and the organs responsible for endocrine are in a sub-healthy state for a long time, it is indeed possible to have lesions.

As for the thyroid nodules found in the physical examination, you don't have to worry too much. Thyroid nodules are likely to be detected in 30% to 60% of adults, but not all nodules need to be treated. In most cases, after the judgment of a specialist, we just need to keep observing.

(Photo/"My Hometown and Me")

After working in thyroid surgery for a long time, I have found that thyroid cancer patients who are diagnosed for the first time tend to go to two extremes:

On the one hand, they feel extremely frightened, feeling that their lives are short, and they have even explained their future to their families, and on the other hand, they are extremely unconcerned, thinking that this is an indolent cancer, and they try home remedies and massages by themselves, but they do not go to the hospital to see a doctor, and when they have to go to the doctor, the disease has often progressed very seriously.

Both extremes are due to the fact that the public does not have enough and correct understanding of thyroid cancer and even tumors.

In fact, as long as early detection, early diagnosis and early treatment, the vast majority of thyroid cancer patients will not be treated for more than a month, and after timely surgery and other related treatments, patients can return to work quickly, and the treatment cost is relatively low.

Even if it is found at an advanced stage, after surgery and standardized treatment, the five- or ten-year survival rate is still very high. Therefore, if you are really unfortunate enough to be diagnosed with thyroid cancer, I hope you will not be overly nervous, and do not give up easily.

Ending:

After many years of practice, Director Xu Bo has spent time in various surgical wards such as hepatobiliary, pancreas, gastrointestinal, and breast, and in comparison, the thyroid ward can be said to be the least painful place.

However, no matter how mild the cancer is, it is a big deal for the patient himself. From the moment they learned to accept that they had cancer, every patient has entered a new stage in their lives.

Some people are able to deal with it calmly at the beginning, and some people still have not recovered from the pain caused by the disease to this day. But in the end, they all chose to talk about their experiences, hoping to hold up a small umbrella for someone who was in the rain.

And no matter what mentality they had in the face of this major event, they are now doing their best to gradually return to their supposed peaceful and beautiful life.

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