When I had a total thyroidectomy for thyroid cancer in 2003 I woke up with a large bulky dressing across the front of my neck. The first thing I noticed was that I could barely talk. My throat was extremely hoarse. After that I noticed other things, such as the difficulty I had picking my head up due to sore neck muscles. This continued for close to a year after my surgery. When the dressing came off it revealed a 3 to 4 inch scar across the front of my neck. I jokingly told my husband that I looked like my head had been chopped off with a butter knife and roughly been sewn back on. Truthfully, it looked horrible. It was almost a year before I could walk into a grocery store without people asking what happened to me (surgery wasn't very exciting so I eventually started telling people I'd been involved in a knife fight with a rival gang). Sometime about a year after the surgery the scar just vanished. You can hardly see it now, but it sure would have been nice to skip the year I spent looking like Frankenstein.
That's why I was excited to find out that a method of robotic surgery for thyroid cancer has proved successful on about 200 patients. Here's the part you're simply not going to believe, using the robot the thyroid can be completely removed via an incision under the arm pit! "This innovative robot-assisted technique for thyroid surgery represents an exciting new treatment option for patients with thyroid cancer," said Woong Youn Chung, MD, PhD, Yonsei University College of Medicine in Seoul. "Not only does it offer good clinical outcomes, but it also spares patients from the large, visible scar that results from traditional open surgery."
Now, if I could just build a time machine, go back to 2003 (taking the robotic surgery technology with me of course), and have my surgery again I could avoid the year of looking like something that just stepped out of a graveyard. Hmm.... I just need a flux capacitor...
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