Personal Update: A(nother) Tumor?!

Uuuuuuuuugh.

To preface all of this, hello. I’m Olive, a 33-year-old woman suffering from a cocktail of chronic conditions. I’m no medical expert, and nothing I discuss here in this blurb is a substitute for actual medical advice. If you happen to read something that clicks with you a little too much–please bring it up to a medical professional that you trust.

For a while, I’d been suffering from an inexplicable list of symptoms–too many to list here and go into depth about, but to describe some of the ones that were either especially concerning and/or interfered with my ability to function as a human artist in her studio:

The biggest one: lethargy.

I’d experience sudden drops in my energy levels, to the point where I could not stay awake. Not without a LOT of effort on my part. I’d literally nod off in the middle of doing tasks. The earliest memory I had of this specific symptom was after finishing a test early in middle school–though that could have just been a result of not ever getting good sleep, full stop. I nodded off with a sharpened pencil pointing towards the ceiling and nailed myself in the forehead. I can still kinda see that scar to this day. Even during my time working as a temp quality assurance tester, I noticed my energy would suddenly plummet. I’ve had periods in the middle of the day where suddenly it physically hurt to be awake. And that sucked.

The polar opposite: insomnia.

If you’ve known me closely for a while, it’ll be little to no surprise to you that I have either had horrid quality sleep, or have not slept…at all. The biggest example of this was when I was running an original character tournament some 14 or so years ago and…kinda went all in…? But to be fair, this could have also been the fact that I have had undiagnosed (and thus untreated) ADHD since childhood, and that tourney became my hyperfixation.

Sooo, I didn’t sleep.

Coupled with the all-too-frequently occurring nightmares that I later found out were related to my childhood trauma, I didn’t get much (good) sleep at all. Many, many years later, there are nights when I either can’t get to sleep or do so only to wake up a couple hours later.

No, what really set these apart for me was the fact that I’d wake up in the middle of the night drenched in sweat with a pounding & racing heart and an overwhelming sense of dread. Sometimes I’d wake up feeling like my insides were on Fucking Fire with no hopes of relief (and if anything touched my skin it’d hurt), which my psychiatrist and I suspected for a bit had something to do with…some chronic illness I can’t remember the name of there’s a lot of them.

Even talking to a cardiologist and doing all the scans and even one of those annoying sticky heart monitors revealed that my heart’s just fine. In fact, my cardiologist looked at me and said (not verbatim), “see you next year.” Which I mean…if that’s not a confident vote that I’m fine, I don’t know what is.

Even after talking with my psychiatrist, who prescribed me pills to help me get to sleep, I was left scratching my head. Now this isn’t to say that if you happen to have night sweats and very severe anxiety, there’s probably “some underlying cause.” GERD, [insert other chronic condition here]–I exhausted just about every possibility with my doctors and something wasn’t adding up.

You know what wasn’t adding up?

My neck was swelling where, as I discovered, my thyroid is located.

It has been for a while. And after a quietly swelling jawline revealed an aggressive yet benign tumor back in 2018-2019, my wife and I grew concerned. That noncancerous growth took half my jaw, after all. What’s to say this potentially noncancerous growth won’t take half my neck?

Combined with things like running out of breath while talking (it happened to me a lot on my streams) and difficulty breathing and swallowing along with–the obvious–feeling like there was something pressing against my throat, I was kind of…losing my mind a bit.

So after letting it take the backseat to me having Diabetes this whole time, my wife and I decided it was time to talk to my new endocrinologist–first and foremost–about the large lump forming in my neck on my thyroid. Turns out that lump was a nodule that has taken up residence on the entirety of my left thyroid lobe. That bad boy is wall-to-wall, large and in charge.

The Doc ordered a needle biopsy, and sure enough, it revealed some troubling signs. The biopsy was–for the most part–inconclusive, so they forwarded it to a specialized lab, which hit me with the

70-80% Positive

Of course, being human and a bit spooked, my first thought was “fuck, I have cancer.”

And that thought kind of haunted me for the most part I think until i talked to the endocrinologist (and later the oncologist) about the result. Endo said “hey I’ve seen lab results that said ‘99% positive for cancer’ and the extraction and analysis returned with ‘hey that’s not cancer’.”

But she agreed that this stupid thing–a tumor–has gotten too big for its britches and needs to get out.

So Friday, I talked to the oncologist and learned that I am losing my left lobe. Got the operation date and everything. He didn’t seem too worried, and neither did the endo, so I’m not freaking out.

He even subtracted like 10-15% off the lab result.

But who am I kidding, I’m freaking out.

I dread to think that I possibly have cancer, but a lot of my symptoms just don’t make sense. The thyroid sits at a part of my internal ecosystem that branches into a lot of my systems: skin nails and hair, circulatory, 28 Days Later…

We’re on the waitlist to get a potentially earlier operation date, but I have my doubts that anything will come up. So I’m gearing up for an operation to get another squatting tumor evicted.

All that is to say…

Hello. Hi.

I’m hanging in there. This felt too personal to post on social media or even Ko-Fi, so I settled for ranting a little bit about it here. My doctors, my wife, my found family and I are crossing our fingers that this explains the above chronic symptoms (as well as the rest of that cocktail) and I can get to healing and accommodating for any complications that have arisen as a result.

I just finished doing a temporary setup on my recording booth so I can get into voice acting, and I even started an indie game project recently that I’m hoping I won’t have to put on indefinite pause because either my symptoms or something else get worse.

I hope beyond hope that I can soon get into the flow of creating and sharing my stories with you, (mostly) unimpeded.

I don’t know. I don’t want to make promises I can’t keep, especially with the nature of ✨chronic conditions.✨

This year’s been really rough, huh? =_=

Damn…

TL;DR: I have a tumor in my thyroid. Here’s hoping it’s not cancerous. 🤞🏽

Moving on–I hope you have a great day and thanks for reading my rambles. I hope to have more fun topics to write about, but in the meantime, much love to you.

Stay safe out there.