Yeah, I am doing well Jeanne! My surgery to remove the cancer by taking out the thyroid and lymph nodes was in July 2015. I started Remicade November 2015. Thyroid cancer recurrence is pretty easy to monitor via blood tests, because thyroid cells produce a protein that gets picked up on blood tests in the event of recurrence or spread. Between blood tests and scans, I have been cancer free since. I was stage 3 because when they did surgery they found a metastasis into the 2 lymph nodes near the thyroid, but apparently that's as far as it got and those lymph nodes were removed. It is typically a slow growing cancer.
I wish you the best with the Chemo. One of the Court Reporters I work with had breast cancer and then chemo treatment like you around 7 years ago. Like my treatment, at Smilow in New Haven. She was in her early 50s at the time, and a very attractive woman with beautiful long hair. She lost all the hair but it did eventually grow back and she is doing very well now. She also had a double mastectomy. We stayed in touch during our respective treatments. I was really glad her hair came back because I think she was concerned about it and she really had and has a wonderful long mane of hair.
If you can do Entyvio between the chemo treatments, that is ideal. I was not really given that choice. Both my endocrinologist (they treat thyroid cancer, the only cancer not treated by oncologists) and my GI did not want me starting on Remicade until months after my surgery and radioactive iodine had completed. I received a pretty high dosage of radioactive iodine at Smilow Hospital in New Haven (157 millicuries) after surgery. It was a very weird procedure- they put me in a small room and 4 doctors (I think 3 of them may have been students) came into the room in HazMat suits and gave me a lead canister with the liquid radioactive iodine which I had to drink. It's usually taken via pills, but they gave me liquid because of my IBD and so as to insure full absorption! It tasted like salt water. Only had to drink like very little, maybe 1/4 cup. No side effects from it but I was on a low iodine diet for like 3 or 4 weeks prior which is the worst diet ever, because you basically can't eat anything that tastes good, LOL.
I remember also while I was at Smilow some guy came in from the federal nuclear regulatory commission (NRC) and basically gave me a lecture and some federal guidelines to follow- the big things were, (1) complete self isolation in my condo for 1 week until I lost my radioactivity, (2) I had to flush the toilet like 3 times every time I used it for a week, and (3) I could not take my garbage out for a week. I was also told that any contact, even fleeting, with dogs or pregnant women could be harmful to them and to avoid such contact if I went out for a walk etc.
