I have never had to experience what it would be like to have cancer. I haven’t had to experience having surgery and having my body cut into. I never had to go through rehabilitation for any disease at all. My mom didn’t happen to be so lucky.
In 1991 my mother was diagnosed with thyroid cancer. A tumor had embedded itself onto part of my mom’s thyroid and had become cancerous. Although the chance of the tumor becoming cancerous is very rare, since the percentage of the tumor becoming cancerous is less then five percent (Statistics 1), my mom happened to be one of the unlucky ones. Almost suddenly without warning my moms life would change for the rest of her life.
She said that she noticed slight swelling and stiffness in her neck that had been constantly harassing her for a couple weeks. This is very common
She now has no thyroid. She now relies on pills to satisfy her body’s needs. This is called Thyroid Hormonal Therapy, one of the most common forms of treatment for thyroid cancer after surgery (Cancer 2). She needs this treatment because the thyroid helps breakdown and absorb the iodine’s in food, which help to make the hormones our bodies need to function correctly. The thyroid also regulates the body’s metabolism and how the body creates and uses energy (Disease Introduction 2).
in thyroidal cases (Disease Introduction 2). This she put off because she sometimes gets pains in her neck from the bar in her back, the result of an injury in the 70’s. Finally she decided to go to a local physician for a medical opinion. She was diagnosed with Papillary carcinoma, the most common form of thyroid cancer. This occurs in 70