#038. Trading Time for Answers to Cancer

Finding time to trial, time to error, time to heal so that I would have time to spare.

When I was twenty-nine years old, I was diagnosed with Stage 2 Papillary Thyroid Carcinoma (PTC). There was a senselessness to it all that gave cancer its ominous power.

What’s happening?

Am I going to die?

I’m not ready to die yet.

How could this happen to me?

Maybe it was my upbringing in Eastern culture, my career in holistic medicine, or maybe my youthful naivete, but I felt that cancer had to be more than just a merciless killer of innocent people. Somewhere beyond the fear, a part of me yearned to understand, “Why?”

What if cancer was a symptom of something greater? A message perhaps? Or even, dare I say, an opportunity?

I had heard stories of nameless second degree connections who had cancer, then surgery. Then recurrent cancer, and surgery again. And again. And again. One friend-of-a-friend had four recurrences and four surgeries.

The diagnosis was hard enough. I couldn’t imagine going through this again. But if my body, my life, or the universe was trying to tell me something, I feared that I would be missing something important by removing the tumor right away.

Ironically, in order to explore this curiosity, I would need more time. Time to trial, time to error, time to heal so that I would have time to spare. 

In my mind, I was making a rational decision and taking a calculated risk on how to spend my time, a coveted resource. I “only” had Stage 2 cancer. This meant that my tumor, lovingly named Thyroideous Rex (T.Rex), was less than 4 cm in diameter and had not spread to regional lymph nodes or anywhere else in the body. The five-year survival rate for this type of cancer was about 99.9% following treatment¹. And the recurrence rate for early-stage PTC was from 1.6%-7.4%²³. Those odds seemed favorable for my experiment.

So, against the recommendations of my doctors and loved ones, I put off surgery to seek answers and healing. Instead, opting to monitor T.Rex for changes every six months.

This was absolute heresy and crazy to them. Because even if numbers don’t lie, the stats don’t always matter when it comes to life and death matters, especially for the people who love you. It was difficult for them to accept my personal choices that seemed opposed to safety and life-affirmation.

Was this truly curiosity? A high risk tolerance? Or was it just hubris, denial, or plain recklessness? 

Maybe all of it, I don’t know. All I knew was that I needed to try.

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I gave this experiment everything I knew to give at that time. I already had a healthy lifestyle by most standards, but I did even more. Most of my free-time outside of work was occupied by this developing obsession.

Lab tests, vitamins, meditation, yoga, superfoods, journaling, therapy, another type of healer, another type of therapy, another diet. I even sat through a few plant medicine ceremonies. It was exhausting, but I learned so much about myself and grew so much in that time.

And at first, I thought it was paying off. “No change”. “Unremarkable findings”. For many scans and blood draws, all was quiet.

Then at the two year mark, T.Rex suddenly grew almost 30%. I was pushing up against the edge of Stage 2 going on Stage 3 cancer. I’m not sure what changed or didn’t in that interval leading to the last check-up, but the lack of rhyme or reason terrified me.

Here’s the thing. A reclassification to Stage 3 PTC would completely take the fun out of the game. Because of the spread to surrounding tissues or lymph nodes, the cancer would be “intermediate-risk” instead of “low-risk”⁴. And although the 5-year survival rate for Stage 3 PTC only drops from 99.9% to 98.3%⁵, the recurrence rate jumps from 1.6%-7.4% to a whopping 22.7%-28% ⁶⁷.

Not only that, the treatment plan would change significantly. A Stage 3 surgical intervention involved a total thyroidectomy and a neck lymph node dissection followed by radioactive iodine (RAI) ablation. Literally, cut everything out and then nuke it. This ensured that zero thyroid tissue remain and therefore no ability to create thyroid hormone.

Without thyroid hormone, I’d have trouble maintaining normal bodily functions like digestion, cognition, mood, sleep, reproduction, weight control, and temperature regulation. This is just the short list because thyroid hormone regulates metabolism for every single cell in the body. 

I would likely need to take synthetic thyroid hormones for the rest of my life. And even so, this would only improve symptoms, but not normalize them.

TLDR; progressing to Stage 3 cancer was ALL BAD. There was a risk that my quality of life would change forever. This was not a risk I was willing to take.

To the thrill of my stakeholders, this was where I ended this “crazy and reckless” experiment and finally had the surgery.

So, was it worth it?

It was truly a privilege, a luxury, and a blessing to enjoy that time and now this extra time as I know its a gift not all cancer diagnoses are afforded.

However, despite my valiant efforts, I couldn’t cure my own cancer.

It showed me that the ego cannot outsmart natural law. It showed me how to embrace humility and yield with grace when things are outside of your control. It showed me the grandness of life’s mysteries and how I was a piece of that. It also showed me how to have gratitude and compassion for the people in my life who put up with my shit - I’m glad to have finally relieved them of the anxiety I put them through.

Alas, every single one was a hard lesson to learn. And although I don’t recommend having cancer, it was indeed an opportunity to fast-track personal and spiritual growth. Ladies and gentlemen, be careful what you wish for.

You’ll be happy to know that my experiment didn’t go to waste. Because of all the work I put in, I went into surgery in the best mental-emotional-physical state of my life. But if I’m being honest, after surgery was when the real work began.

To be continued…

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Thanks to Derek Wong, Paudan Jain, Trupthi Shetty, Justin Kamm, Steven Foster, and Alexandra Allen for the excellent feedback - you helped me fill in all the plotholes to my story. This is the first of five essays that I’m publishing for Write of Passage.

1. Thyroid Cancer Stages. https://www.cancercenter.com/cancer-types/thyroid-cancer/stages

2. Ywata de Carvalho A, Kohler HF, Gomes CC, Vartanian JG, Kowalski LP. Predictive factors for recurrence of papillary thyroid carcinoma: analysis of 4,085 patients. Acta Otorhinolaryngol Ital. 2021 Jun;41(3):236-242. doi: 10.14639/0392-100X-N1412. PMID: 34264917; PMCID: PMC8283398. https://www.actaitalica.it/article/view/1412 

3. Jui-Hung Sun et al. Evaluation of recurrence risk in patients with papillary thyroid cancer through tumor-node-metastasis staging: A single-center observational study in Taiwan, Biomedical Journal, Volume 45, Issue 6, 2022, Pages 923-930. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bj.2021.11.009

4. Thyroid Cancer Stages.

5. Thyroid Cancer Stages.

6. Ywata de Carvalho A et al. Predictive factors for recurrence of papillary thyroid carcinoma.

7. Jui-Hung Sun et al. Evaluation of recurrent risk in patients with papillary thyroid cancer.