Friday, February 17, 2012

More Ultrasound Surprises

A few weeks ago Ronny and I went to the open house for the new University of Utah Health Center here in Daybreak. Its massive and awesome, sure wish it had been open last year at this time! Anyway, they were doing several free assessments, including an ultrasound on the caryatid artery to check for plaque. Ronny was all for it and we waited in line. While both of us had no plague in the arteries the technician also checked our thyroid glands. When the tech started on the left side of Ronny's neck I asked what that odd mushroom looking object with a large black sack around it that seemed to be growing off his gland was. The tech turned and was surprised I caught it, I told him I had had my fair share of ultrasounds and could spot something out of place especially such a strange looking thing that clearly was not right.
He recommended Ronny have it checked out. Yeah, no problem there!

During the next week we talked to a few docs in the family to get their assessment. All said it was probably nothing but that he should definitely get it checked out. We also did a little hunting on the internet and found out that only about 5% of these are cancerous and then they listed about 6 risk factors, 4 of which Ronny fell into including being of male gender. So with our past history of rare medical finds, Ronny saw an internist yesterday and had his blood drawn for several tests. Today he gets another ultrasound and then a followup appointment next week. They'll decide then if it needs to be biopsied. Last night he was telling me that he had never had so much blood taken at one time (4 vials). I laughed out loud and told him it wasn't as much as he thought, then again when you see Ronny having any kind of needle near him it was enough to set off a few butterflies in his stomach. We'll see what the doctor says next week and where we go from here. We are very optimistic that this is not something major to worry about, however it seems that we were saying the same thing right about this time last year with a different kind of ultrasound....

2 comments:

heather b. said...

Funny thing is that I just went through the same thing. I ended up having a biopsy on my mass and luckily it came back benign. Tell Donny that 4 vials of blood is nothing. Just a few weeks ago I had about 12 vials of taken at one time. I hope you get hood news like I did.

heather b. said...

Sorry that was suppose to say Ronny not Donny....I'm doing this from my kindle and it auto corrected it.