lol cherry. no offense taken my friend. i like your sense of humour. you made me laugh. thanks for that. 6 days now til surgery for me and i'm trembling in my boots! glad i have a busy week planned cos it will keep my mind off things to a certain extent.
thank you for your help and thank you everyone else. you are all great ppl and i dont know what i would have done without all your support.
will post and let you know how the surgery went when i can.
be happy everyone:)

Hi pepy, I had my total thyriodectomy sept 2005. I don't remember how long the surgery took but it was like 2 or 3 hrs. The surgeon did check my parathyriods which mine were fine. I was in pain from the drainage tube which I started out with a lot of drainage but did taper down.The tube had to stay in a couple days longer.I spent the night in the hospital and went home the next day. I had a lot of swelling that took several wks to go down.(I had gallbladdle surgery back in 94 which I had pain due to the drainage tube.)I felt fine other than the pain and had to sleep off the anethesia. I have FM and CFS so I never really had any energy but did not have any change from the surgery. The 2 main compications are low calcium level which they would give you calcium by IV. The other is the surgeon could accidently injure the nerve going to the voice box, this leaves you horse but over time it improves. My calcium levels were fine but my nerve did get injure. I was horse for a good 6 months. To this day from time to time I get horse when I'm tired.
You will be on thyroxine for a short period for preperation for the blood tests and body scan.Your doctor will but you on synthriod for the rest of your life because you will no longer have the thyriod to produce any thyriod hormones. Also your doctor may have you take a calcium suppliment. I'm on the viactiv + vitD 1 daily.
After the surgery a month or so down the road for 5yrs they will do yearly blood tests and body scan to see if any thriod cells comes back with cancer. They gave me 2 shots of thyrogen on 2 consectitive days. This does make you feel bad for about a week.
I too did a lot of research when I was diagnosed with thyriod cancer. I was a RN but due to the fibromyalgia I had to go on disability.
Oh one other thing that happened with me was I had a reaction to the suiture she use inside which caused extra drainage and longer for my incision to heal. My incision is about 2-3inches long and healed up well. It isn't noticable unless you look for it.
Oh one more thing I had a hard swollen thing from the sugery that I never really did get a straight answer as to what it was but it did go away in time. I think it took 3-4 months for it to go completely go away.
I hope this helps as you heal.

thank you cherrivit for all the info. glad to hear everythings settled down in the thyroid quarter. hope tho you're doing better with your other probs.
just wanted to say thanks to everyone for all your help and advice. it really did help.
i am absolutely fine. i am 3 days post op now. D-day was saturday 8.30am (first on the list). it took about 3 hours and i was back on the ward by 1.30pm, up and walking about by 4.00pm and out the next day. the scar is very neat, a bit sore, as is the inside of my throat still but i'm doing well. i dont know exactly what they did other than they took the whole thyroid. no one seemed to know if any lymph nodes or glands were taken, but i see the surgeon again in two weeks to get the results from the lab and we'll take it from there. i do feel extremely tired tho but i guess thats to be expected. its early days yet. unfortunately, they could not do my breast as was supposed to happen cos they discovered a much larger area and now they wanna do a mastectomy. i go for new biopsies in two weeks and we take it from there. so there's still gonna be more surgery and it looks like they're gonna be doing it before xmas too. just wish they'd get on with it and get it over with so that i can get on with sorting my liver.
anyway, enough about me. thank you everyone for your support and friendship.
stay positive and keep smiling my friends cos it'll go a long way toward a good result in the long run.
love ya