I have known this about K from the very beginning. I mean, how could I not know about it? It was plain as the nose on your face.
Or rather, the lump on the side of her neck. It was rather obvious.
Here's part of a picture I took the very first time we met, at a fast food place near her home--we had lunch and talked for about an hour. It was in late March. The lump was obvious ...
Since then, we have gotten together from time to time and have had some good times. Indoor swimming pools when it was cool outside. Local lakes during summer. Hikes. Drives. We like to be outdoors.
K works at the customer service desk at a ***mart store. (You would recognize the name in an instant.) During mid summer, she was having work-related problems. She had to work many extra hours because it was the middle of tourist season, and sometimes the management at ***mart only had one person manning the CS desk. Her. She would get tense. And then she made some mistakes; her boss talked to her. "What if they fire me?" she asked me more than once. "I need this job!"
***mart is not shy about firing people, especially this store.
As the work-related stress increased, her neck started bothering her, and she had problems swallowing when she ate or drank. Panic attacks, too. She became more aware of the lump on her neck, which was getting larger. Something else to worry about. It wasn't an easy summer for her.
In late July, during one of my visits, she asked me to drive her to the hospital because she had scheduled an ultrasound test and a visit with her throat specialist. I drove her there, left for a while and picked her up again. The news: The doctor agreed that her lump was getting larger and she should have a needle biopsy of her thyroid. She was worried about that. Would the biopsy, which checks just the area near the needle, miss any cancerous tissue elsewhere in the thyroid? Because, of course, that's what she was worried about.
The doctor agreed, and they agreed to remove the entire lump. Once the date was set, all she could do was wait and arrange for the time away from ***mart. That wasn't so easy--their computerized scheduling system originally assigned her to work on the very day of the surgery, even though she had applied for the time off over a month before. They finally fixed it. (She has insurance through ***-mart, which seems to cover most of the cost.)
We went on our hikes and had our talks during August and early September. The operation was one of the topics, but just one. We talked about other stuff, too--work, family, things we want to do, things we have already done. It obviously didn't get in the way of having a good time on a summer day.
The big day was two weeks ago, on the 19th. My wife and I drove down there that night, had supper with her guy and then we all went to the hospital. She went home the next day, about noon. The tube in her neck was removed the day after that. We visited them again on Thursday--watched a movie and played Uno. We didn't talk about the lump, but we sensed some tension: The lab's report wasn't due until next week.
The final word came last Tuesday during a visit with the doctor. Benign.
She had some neck pain after the operation, but it has been easing. She stopped taking the codeine pills a few days after the surgery. No doubt her neck felt even better after seeing the doctor last week. It's still rather sore, she told me over the weekend.
This Tuesday, she goes back to work at ***mart. But she has made a change there, too--she is not going back to customer service. Instead, she will once again be a cashier. It pays a little less, but it spares her from a lot of stress, and it seems like a wise decision. Let someone else deal with that.
When I see her again (maybe next week), the lump will be gone. Maybe life will start being a bit happier for her again, too. I hope so.
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