Sunday, August 15, 2010

Tomorrow Is The Day

I haven't written for a number of days, for a variety of reasons. Some of them include, but are not limited to, I'm just tired (10+days of no thyroid hormone will do that to you), we had finals last week, I've been grading like a mad woman, I've been on a horrible, horrendous, no good diet that takes all that I've got just to find something to eat, and lastly, I'm just in a bad mood.
Tomorrow I go into the hospital, provided that all goes well, and I'll take my radiation and hopefully this whole ordeal will be behind us. I'm not really nervous at all about the actual procedure, but am nervous about the full body scan that I'll have on Friday. Friday will be the day when we will know if this has gone anywhere else, however, provided that the dose is high enough, we can be pretty confident that the radioactive iodine will clear it from my body.
I've been following a low to no iodine diet for 11 days now that seriously limits what I can eat. Basically I can have no dairy, soy, iodized salt, commercially prepared meat, and limited pasta. This seems like it would be pretty easy, but there is salt in EVERYTHING! Just go look in your pantry at even your cereal boxes and salt will be listed, which means that I can't have it at all. So, I'm hungry and can't eat anything. That makes me an unhappy person to be around.
Anyway, tomorrow is the day, well I hope anyway. I had about 10 years shaved off my life on Friday afternoon after a very negative and upsetting encounter with my insurance company whereby I went back and forth between them and the hospital and the doctor, all claiming that the codes either didn't come from them or that they didn't have the right ones and the insurance co wasn't going to pay. Needless to say, I wouldn't be able to do this on Monday, but after calling, directly, my patient advocate, Yulanda, I was told that it was straightened out and I am expected to appear tomorrow. I'm hoping and praying that it all goes off without a hitch as the insurance company has/had no sympathy for me whatsoever and was not interested in helping me straighten this out. We shall see.
So, if you don't hear from me, then I'm in and doing what needs to be done. Let's just hope for that and no other setbacks.