Part 1 - What is this thing?

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Part 1 - What is this thing?

(Period of time: beginning of January - March 2010)

The whole story started when I was 14. It was shortly after Christmas, the beginning of January 2010. I sat at our dining table with my grandma. I don't really remember what I did, but she was watching me. Then she suddenly said: "Do you have a struma?" She came nearer and looked at my neck. On the front I had something like an Adam's apple. The difference was, that I am a girl and it was not where an Adam's apple was supposed to be, but further down and on the right of the airway. My grandma once had a struma, but 20 years ago, when she was 40, so she knew what it looked like. 40 is more like the time you get it. But I was 14.  

I never recognized it. The knob on my neck. 

She still looked at it, but couldn't imagine a girl of 14 years having a struma, so she kind of forgot about it again.  

(Btw: If you don't know what a struma is: It's like a knot of throat tissue, that can grow. It's not dangerous at all. Just a deformation of tissue. Basically a benign tumor) 

That evening I told my mum about it and she wasn't really worried as well. She said that it's probably something that had to do with my thyroid gland and that would be the answer why I was so thin. We decided to go to a doctor and he'd check it.  

We went to a doctor 2 or 3 weeks afterwards. It was our local pediatrician. He touched and looked at it, but couldn't figure out what it was, so he decided to do an ultrasonic testing. He still didn't know what it was. We told him that my granny thought that it was a struma, but he wasn't really convinced, because as I said: I was 14. That's not the time to get a struma! 

He took a blood sample from me (my very first one. It hurt!) and said we should wait for the results. 

When the results arrived, I was kind of nervous, because the doctor had told me that there might be a surgery coming up, because I could probably not get rid of it just with pills and medicine. We read the results: nothing. No one knew what it was. Our pediatrician said that we should go to a special doctor in the city. That was what we did.  

The first hospital we went to was a Children's Hospital. Everything was really cute: The furniture, the pictures on the windows and the paintings on the walls. We had to wait there for the doctor (funny, because he had the same sir name as I do). We've waited there for nearly an hour! Then a nurse came into the waiting room and asked us, why we're still here and not in the doctor's office? We said that no one told us to go there and where it was! -.- 

When we were with the doctor he said exactly the same like the other one: He didn't know what it was. So basically, we wasted over an hour with that stupid doctor. Great. But he told us to go to another doctor (surprise, surprise!). So that was what we did. Again! Luckily all the hospitals were located on one huge campus. 

We went to Dr. Gartner, who was the head of the department for neck and throat problems at the Medical Hospital. 

It was a really old building and kind of odd to be inside, because the ceilings were really high and looked ancient, but the furniture and the equipment was brand new. 

We had to wait around 10 minutes until we were allowed to go inside his office.  

It was a bit interlaced and there were many small little rooms, all of them connected. We showed him the papers, which the other doctor had given us and he read them. He touched 'the thing' too, but could find out what it was as well! But he had the assumption that it really might be a struma. But because he wasn't sure, he said he wanted to puncture the 'thing'. I had no idea what that meant. I had to lie down and he got a really, really, REALLY big injection. But he didn't want to put something INSIDE of me, he wanted to take something OUT! I was scared and waited for him to benumb the spot where he wanted to put that thing inside me. But he didn't! He just putted it inside, and I held my mum's hand. Luckily, it didn't hurt that much, but my mum said, that it looked horrifying. Now he had a sample of 'the thing' and said that everything he could see with his bare eyes looked good and wasn't a tumor. 

We went home.  

A few days after the day with the bodkin we went there again. He told us that everything was ok and that it really was a struma. Believe it or not! A 14 year old girl with a struma!  

He said that I could keep it, but it would grow and that wouldn't be so pretty. And I had seen in the last two month that it had grown. So we decided to have a surgery.  

At first we thought about a date and I wanted to wait as long as possible of course. ;) 

But my mum said that it would be better to do it in the summer holidays than in the autumn ones. We made an appointment for the 30th of August (my granny's birthday; we didn't choose that date on purpose of course!). 

And till then nothing happened. I mean, what should happen? I had an appointment to get rid of it. I trusted the doctor that it wasn't a tumor. So I lived my life like before, unsuspecting something really bad would happen...

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