Home from the Hospital

Here's my pretty neck right before I left to go to the doctor and have my steri-strips removed. No stitches folks, Dermabond! Skin glue works great.
Here's my pretty neck after coming back from the doctor. That greenish-yellow color around the back area is indeed bruising. My skin was starting to get a little irritated by the steri-strips but the glue is holding after only 4 days!
I don't even have any lifting restrictions after this surgery so I can hold my babies. They are happy to have their mom back and I'm happy to be back.
Parker's so happy he has to show off his little cat-tongue. I'm not sure why we call it that but he has a weird looking tongue, like it's too small for his mouth or something.
Okay, so on to the update. My doctor at first started to say I had stage III or stage IV papillary thyroid cancer but then he looked at the pathology report and some chart and said that because of my age I was actually a stage I, which puts me at around a 90% survival rate. He said they have recently updated the staging criteria and that's why he was so off. I'm still not sure I trust it. I would think I would be a stage II at least since I had so many metases. 7 out of 12 nodes have been cancerous so far. They haven't done the report on the central node dissection yet, only the right side. While he was in my neck he found two more masses that looked just like the first thing he took out. Those three masses were at least 90% taken over by cancer cells which is why they no longer resembled lymph nodes and confused the other pathologist that called them cleft cysts. So I'm not rare in that regard. This is just typical papillary thyroid cancer. The tumor they found in my thyroid was 2.5 cm. So for now I'm just trying to heal and I go see my Endocrinologist on July 2nd and we talk about when to start my radiation. It will all depend on my TSH levels I guess. One unpleasant and scary thing that has come up is that my chest x-ray that I had the week before my surgery showed a small granuloma on my left lung. We are really hoping that this isn't the cancer having spread but we won't know until after I have my PET scan. If the area lights up on the scan after I take the radioactive iodine then it's cancer but hopefully it's just scar tissue from a previous infection.
Since my surgery, I am having difficulty talking loud, which is pretty normal, and difficulty swallowing liquids without aspirating into my lungs. That sucks cuz then I start coughing and that is really difficult and painful. One of my vocal cords may have been slightly damaged which would cause these things but it looks better today than it did the other day and I'm slowly starting to talk louder so it is healing. The other weird feeling is my right ear. I can't really feel it. Except it itches. If I scratch it, I can't really feel that I'm scratching it. It is quite annoying so I look forward to those nerves healing and getting back to normal.
I have to have my calcium levels monitored because 2 of my parathyroid glands were lost and one had to be transplanted out of my thyroid and into a muscle so it could take a moment to work again. But so far my calcium levels have looked good so I don't think I'll have to be on calcium for the rest of my life. I'm exhausted now so that's all I can think of. Sorry it's so long.