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I have to start by saying heartfelt thanks to all of you that have sent emails, phoned, posted cards, visited me at home or in hospital or responded over the vle. Your support, prayers, best wishes and thoughts have been a tremendous boost and great encouragement. I'm not ready to give up although there have been some black moments over the last couple of months. It is deeply moving to know that so many friends, relations, colleagues and acquaintances are rooting for me - if only the power of thought alone were a cure!

So - what's the news?

Well, as you know I went in to hospital for the second lot of surgery last week. Friday morning at 9.00am saw me in the operating theatre having my thyroid gland removed. As far as I can tell this took about 4 hours and I was out again and in recovery by 2.00pm when the ENT surgeon came to see me. He told me they had removed all my thyroid and several parathyroid glands. He felt they had managed to removed all the tumorous tissue but it seems to have been a close run thing - 'sticky' as another surgeon described it. I'm not sure what this means but a third surgeon told me that the tumour was towards the back of the thyroid. I suspect that it may have come close to attaching to my throat or gullet but they were able to separate it. This could mean that traces of the growth have been left behind but the pathology results are not yet available. If they show anything suspicious I will have to go and spend a few days in the oncology centre in Cheltenham being treated with radio-active iodine. This is designed to seek out any remaining thyroid cells and destroy them together with any cancer they carry. Apparently the prognosis for thyroid cancer is pretty good and there is a high rate of dealing with it successfully. The Head and Neck surgeon who was in attendance told me that there were no signs of secondary growths from my tumour of last year. The only cancer they found was within the thyroid and visual inspection appeared to confirm what the PET scan suggested, last year's cancer has not regrown anywhere. As treatment for that ended in November they would expect to see evidence of re-growth by now.

So for now I'm left with no thyroid and one, bruised parathyroid gland. The glands all have different roles in controlling the levels of hormones and calcium in the bloodstream and consequently I will now have to live on a diet of pills for the rest of my life. Still I know that many people regularly take similar medication so I'll not be alone. Unfortunately the surgery showed that the nerve that drives my left vocal chord has been damaged beyond recovery. This chord will not work again and as a result my voice is still weak. Part of the surgery involved shoving a tube down my throat to prevent any risk of my throat collapsing and blocking my airway. Throats don't take too kindly to this kind of abuse so, at the moment, my voice is even weaker than it was. It is working though and there are several grounds to hope that it will improve. These range from self-healing where the right vocal chord tends to stretch over towards the left and consequently close the gap between them, to voice therapy, to a form of surgery whereby the palsied chord is injected with Teflon to make it stiffer and larger thus vibrating more easily and also closing the space. I've also done a little research on the internet and discovered that there are all sorts of voice amplifiers that sit in a shirt pocket and use a throat microphone to enable (almost) normal communication - so that'll be all right then. Of all the things that have happened the thought that I'd be left with no voice, unable to communicate and take part in normal conversation was the most distressing.

Back to last Friday. By about 3.00pm one of the nurses on the critical care ward (more of this later) had phoned Elaine and told her it was OK to come in and see me. Naturally she was concerned to hear that I was in critical care and came straight away only to find me sitting up, talking (well whispering really), waving, eating lunch and generally looking about a thousand times better that she expected. I was in the critical care ward because there were no other beds available. I was well looked after but spent a disturbed night as there was another gentleman on the ward who was moaning and groaning and calling out all night. They gave me a reading lamp and some ear-plugs and I read myself to sleep and resumed reading when I awoke. I survived the night and was eventually returned to the Head and Neck ward on Saturday afternoon. By Sunday I was ready to go home but I still had a drain in place and several cannulas in my hand. Another day in hospital. On Monday they decided that my blood levels showed a calcium deficiency. More drips, pills and tablets. No change. Another drip. Still no improvement. More blood tests on Tuesday morning. Calcium levels had dropped. Was I getting pins and needles? I didn't think so but the chairs were so high that I wasn't sure whether I was getting a tingling in my legs or not. Certainly my lip felt strange but surely it had been like that before the surgery - I'd put it down to my nerves recovering from last year's surgery; just what they'd told me would happen. It's really funny being asked how something feels - trying to be precise about how a feeling has changed is almost impossible as how can you quantify a physical sensation and then compare it to one of a day or two ago? Still the calcium levels had dropped and it was clearly a concern for them, they didn't want to discharge me. Instead I had to have a giant drip that would take ten hours or more. So that took all of Tuesday right up to 1.00am Wednesday morning. After breakfast on Wednesday morning the vampire came again to draw blood. The results showed that my level had gone up from 1.72 (worry threshold 1.80) to about 2.35 (comfort threshold over 2.00). I was free to go. After days that had been so boring that I couldn't even motivate myself to read a good book, I felt like a rabbit with the runs - I couldn't get out of there fast enough. I had to wait a while for E. to arrive with the Honda chariot and carry me away. But not for long. I have to go back tomorrow for a follow up blood test and to have my stitches removed and then again next Tuesday to meet the butcher and see what the path. results show us. As I said before, I have a strong suspicion that they'll want me in again for a few days of boring, radio-active isolation.

And then we'll see!

So, once again thanks to you all for your thoughts, hopes and support. As I've heard so many times before, you don't really appreciate your good health until you loose it. I feel as though I've stepped over a huge rock to arrive where I am now and I'm desperately searching for a way back to the healthy side. I asked one of the surgeons whether I could be cautiously optimistic now the thyroid was out. He thought about it for a while and then said that I could certainly be less pessimistic. I suppose that will have to do for now.

Love to you all,

Ron