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By Tori Rosin

I wasn’t allowed to speak. Nor could I move. Instead, I could only stare at the two-ton piece of metal as it crawled down and returned up my body, examining each and every cell. The visual manifestation of the knowledge that I had thyroid cancer was here today to decide if the past six weeks of worry had been justified. While I laid there, attempting to ignore the machine five inches away from my body, I tried to relax. My mind could only think of room 4630, where I would be spending the next few days after the scan. I had left my bag, filled with CD’s, books, and my journal, on the counter. Hopefully, it wouldn’t be stolen while I was under examination. Julie the Nurse, who had become quite a confidante of mine in the past six weeks, said that this scan would turn up cancerous spots in other areas in my body. In between the scan and room 4630, I would take a 150 millicure capsule of radioactive iodine and return to my room, where I would be in isolation until my little carcinomas would be flushed out of my body (I’ll leave it up to you to figure out how). Hopefully, at the end of this weekend, I would be cancer free. This was merely a blip, I told myself. This didn’t mean that anything detected would sound the death knell on my 21-year-old life. I had nothing to worry about, they said. “Most young people I see with thyroid cancer die of old age,” my surgeon kept on telling me. These 45 minutes under watch and the radioactive iodine were the only things I had to do to end my status as Cancer Girl. I was still worried, no matter how much anyone tried to reassure me. Halfway through my scan, a new technician came in. He allowed me the privilege of talking. This way, I could tell him about the nausea I had been experiencing- I didn’t want to be vomiting radioactive material. ewwww… He reassured me that I would be given a barrage of anti-nausea drugs. “We don’t want you to throw up. It would be dangerous and time-consuming for us to clean up. Plus, you’d have to do your treatment all over again,” the technician sad. After the past two sleepy, sad, stupid, and sick weeks without thyroid hormone (endocrinologists want to make you hypothyroid again before a treatment), I wouldn’t have wished this on anyone. Finally, my scan was over. My mom and the technician stood me up, and led me to the extraspecial waiting room for the nuclear medicine cases. While we waited, Mom read the December ’99 Ladies Home Journal, while I read Kiplinger’s Investment Monthly from September ’96. My opinion of hospitals sank ever lower. When the technician came back, the news seemed good. I was required to take a preliminary dosage of iodine two days before the scan, and there was still so much cancerous and normal tissue in my neck, the iodine absorbed itself there, and didn’t travel further south. Thus, I was able to check out of room 4630. I could take a 30 millicure capsule of iodine and flush all the mutation out of my neck in the comfort of my own home. I needed to have another scan done to make sure all was well within me, but I decided to think about that later. I’ll always remember the skip in my step as I left the Nuclear Medicine wing. My mom thought I was too happy, I guess. As we pulled into our driveway, she said, “Don’t you realize you still have cancer? You will until December, at least.” All chances of having a decent summer (oxymoron that may be) went out the car door right then and there. I had to go through all of this again. Six months of doubt. Exhaustion. The fear that my little carcinomas were making friends with other important organs in my body. I couldn’t wait.