For the first part of my career, I traveled around the world taking care of Olympic-caliber horses. But in 2012, when I was 32, I decided I wanted more stability. Inspired by my mom, who was a nurse, I became a nurse too, near my South Florida home. In April 2020, just after the pandemic began, my husband was laid off, and I had to take a second job. As I was going through a pre-employment screening to work at a hospice provider, the nurse who examined me said my neck looked thick. She ordered extra labs to make sure everything was OK. Nothing alarming came back, so I chalked it up to my being very muscular from years of horseback riding. My throat was a little dry, but I thought that was from wearing a mask all the time. Also, I was tired, but as a night-shift nurse, I operated like an exhausted pigeon most of the time. Nothing seemed really wrong. My main concern at that point was taking care of my patients in the oncology department at Good Samaritan Medical Center. The pandemic was raging, and because they were going through chemo, they had weak immune systems. They had to trust that we would provide care without giving them COVID-19, so I was very careful to entirely cover myself with personal protective equipment. Then one day, about five months after that employment screening, I was washing my hands at work and looked in the mirror as I coughed—I saw a lump that looked like a small golf ball sticking out of my neck. If my neck hadn’t been one of the only exposed parts of my body, I don’t know if I would have noticed it. I remembered what the nurse at the screening had told me about my neck, and I immediately thought, Uh-oh, this can’t be good. My colleagues assured me that it was probably nothing but said it would be a good idea to get it checked out. I was able to get an appointment the next day with an ear, nose, and throat doctor (ENT) who worked at the hospital. He scoped me and said he couldn’t see anything, but just to be safe he wanted to send me for an ultrasound. During the scan 10 days later, the technician found two abnormalities, one on each side of my thyroid gland. When the biopsy came back, it said one nodule was benign and the other was Hürthle cell, which, based on statistics, is also usually benign. But my ENT said that in his experience when there was a Hürthle cell diagnosis it had always turned out to be malignant. He urged me to have surgery as soon as possible. I’m so glad I listened to him. That December, when I was 40, I had a total thyroidectomy. It turned out that both tumors were malignant. I had two different kinds of thyroid cancer, follicular and papillary, and both were completely removed during the surgery. The surgeon also ended up taking out two of my parathyroid glands (pea-size glands behind the thyroid), as my thyroid had grown around them. After the procedure, my surgeon told me that one of her goals as a child had been to be good at untangling necklaces. “That’s what the inside of your neck looked like,” she said. The cancer had wrapped around my left carotid artery, one of the major blood vessels going to my head and neck—had she injured it during surgery, that could have led to paralysis or even death. Given that both my cancers were relatively small and my lymph nodes showed no signs of cancer, I decided to forgo radiation and just manage with medicine. It took a while to find the right one to replace the hormones my thyroid had produced, and I will have to take it for the rest of my life. I had my five-year scan this past January—it was clean, and my blood work was perfect! The long-term survival rate for these cancer types is very high, but I still feel as if I beat cancer’s butt. I now work to help breast and lung cancer patients at Wellington Regional Medical Center in Florida navigate their medical care. I love being an oncology nurse, and finding myself on the other side of the bed has been eye-opening. The entire journey has reinforced to me the importance of kindness, tact, communication, and empathy. I am so grateful to my community of nurses, who are the eyes and ears of health care. They spend so much time with the patients, whose lives depend on their assessment and critical thinking, and their sharing of that information with care teams. That employee-health nurse noticed a subtle change in my anatomy, investigated it, and involved me in the process so I could be more aware of my own health, and it saved my life. For that I will forever be thankful. The thyroid is a butterfly-shaped gland at the base of the neck; it produces hormones with many important functions, including regulation of heart rate, metabolism, and body temperature. Thyroid cancer is diagnosed in around 44,000 Americans each year and is almost three times as common in women as in men. “In most cases of thyroid cancer the patient is asymptomatic—a nodule is found either during a routine physical exam or during an imaging study for some other problem,” says Courtney Gibson, M.D., an associate professor of surgery (endocrine oncology) at Yale School of Medicine. Symptoms of thyroid cancer may include: There are several types of thyroid cancer. The most common kinds, known as well-differentiated thyroid cancers, include papillary, follicular, and Hürthle cell, says Dr. Gibson. “Fortunately, the general prognosis for most thyroid cancers is excellent, with a long-term survival rate higher than 95%,” she adds. Treatments depend on the type of thyroid cancer and its stage when it is found. In most cases surgery to remove all or part of the thyroid gland is recommended, and afterward, patients need to take synthetic thyroid hormones for the rest of their lives. Other treatments, including radioiodine therapy, may also be recommended. Chemotherapy and external beam radiation are usually reserved for advanced cases (metastatic disease) that are not responsive to standard treatment. Did you have symptoms that were hard to decode? We’d love to hear about it. Write to letters@prevention.com.