My Big Scare...

Greetings readers. It’s been a little while since I wrote last, so I figured I would fill you all in on the happenings here in Scott-land.

Work has been really crazy lately. Just to give you an idea: over the next 5 months, we are going to move office buildings to the other side of town in two phases while at the same time opening up 2 (two!!) new offices in different places in the state (one in Bozeman, the other “somewhere else”), so that necessitates a lot of planning, organization and other exciting $5 words that basically mean “lots of work” on top of the stuff I need to do on a daily basis. Whew. We ARE looking for an assistant for me (all applicants need to send me their resume), but it’s slow going.

I started building a TV stand to replace the one that I’m borrowing from the person I used to date’s cousin. I saw one that I liked at a local furniture store for around $860 and I thought to myself, “Self, you can build that stand for less than that.” So, I went home, drew up the plans and bought some oak to build it with. So far, things are going well…I’m learning how to mess up some things, but at the same time, I’m learning how to do other things that I had no clue how to do before. So…it’s win/win!

On to the scary bit…

For about a week and a half now, I’ve had a strange pain in my neck to the right of my Adam’s apple. It only hurts when I talk, swallow or turn my head (read: “Pretty much all the time, but some times worse than others”). Over last weekend, it was bad enough that I decided I needed to go to the doctor. I went on Tuesday and explained what was going on. After answering a bunch of questions and stuff, it was basically boiled down to an infected lymph node, problems with my thyroid, or cancer. Blood was drawn to check my thyroid and I was scheduled for a CAT scan on Wednesday morning.

If you’ve never had a CAT scan, it’s really not that bad. The worst part is the needle for the IV in which they inject you with glow-in-the-dark stuff that makes all your veins kinda warm and gives you a metallic taste and smell (you don’t actually taste like metal, but you taste metal in your mouth…hehe). So, I got my head shoved in a gigantic donut with a bunch of cool looking moving parts, and then went back to work. That afternoon, I got a call from the doctor saying that my blood test came back fine…so there was no problem with the thyroid. That narrowed it down to 1) an infection or 2) cancer. The one thing I WANTED to be removed as a possibility wasn’t.

I didn’t sleep too well that night and went to work and didn’t really get much accomplished during the day. By 2pm, nobody had called me, so I called them. The doctor called right back and said, “Well, you have non-pathological lymph nodes (which I checked and that’s a good thing), and it’s not cancer. We do see that the cartilage on your Adam’s apple has shifted and may be aggravating a lymph node or something.” So…I’m now scheduled to go to an ENT at the end of the month who is going to send a National Geographic camera crew down my throat to try and see what is wrong. The worst thing that can happen at this point (other than using NBA stars for the camera crew) would be a surgery to remove whatever it is that is causing the cartilage shift issue. If nothing else, I’ll come out of that with a cool scar that I can make up a great story about (“Yeah…this kid was trapped under a car and I lifted it out of the way and just at the top of the lift, the bumper cut me. The kid was fine…so that’s all that matters”).

Oh, and I’m still on for the triathlon on Sunday. YAY!! Here’s to not drowning!