Hi Reader,

Nine years ago this week, I woke up in a hospital bed with my thyroid gone.

That's not actually what I want to write about today.

I want to write about a photo. A sunny day on holiday, my husband and daughter behind me, everyone smiling.

An ordinary photo, the kind you take a hundred of and never really look at properly.

Except later, putting together a photo book of that trip, I looked at it properly.

My neck. In that light, at that angle, it was lumpy. Swollen.

Obviously wrong.

I'd been going to doctors for close to ten years by that point, telling them the same thing every time.

I'm exhausted. I don't feel right. Something is wrong. And every time, that got attached to whatever stage of life I happened to be in, instead of anyone actually looking into it. This happens to so many women.

🦋 You've just had a baby
🦋 It's postnatal depression
🦋 You're stressed with little ones
🦋 You're busy
🦋 It's perimenopause
🦋 It's the menopause

Reason after reason, and not once did anyone actually look at my neck.

Once I saw that photo properly, I went back through years of old pictures. It had been there the whole time. Not sudden. Not new. Just slow.

You look at your own neck every single day, brushing your teeth, doing your hair, glancing in the mirror on your way out the door. And somehow, because the change happens so slowly, you never actually see it. I didn't. Not until a photo, taken by accident on a sunny day, showed me what had been there in front of me the whole time.

I took that photo back to my doctor and said, look. Just look. That's when they finally sent me for a scan.

My thyroid was destroyed, and by then the cancer had already metastasised into a lymph node in my neck, a hard lump I hadn't even clocked as separate from everything else.

Because it had been given so long to spread, it was no longer contained within my thyroid.

That meant a far bigger and more dangerous surgery than it should have been.

Instead of just my thyroid coming out, I needed a neck dissection too, a much longer and more serious surgical journey than it would have been if it had been caught while it was still contained.

Nine years on, and I feel so much better than I did in those years before my diagnosis, when I was properly unwell and nobody would look. That's the part people don't expect.

I write a version of this email every single year on this date, and it isn't for sympathy. It's a piece of awareness I feel genuinely responsible for putting out there, because I still can't quite believe how easy it was to miss something that big, on my own neck, for that long.

Here's the bit I really want to land.

We're taught to check our breasts every month, same time, same habit, and most of us actually do it without thinking twice. Nobody ever taught us to check our necks the same way. So don't build a whole new habit from scratch. Just stack it onto the one you've already got.

Next time you check your breasts, check your neck too, right there in the same minute.

🦋 Look in the mirror and tip your head back
🦋 Take a sip of water and swallow while you watch your neck
🦋 Run your hands over it in different light
🦋 Feel for anything hard, swollen, or different from last time
🦋 If you find something, don't wait it out, go to your GP and ask directly for an ultrasound

Mine looked like a bag of marbles by the time anyone took it seriously. Please don't let that be you.

P.S. You don't have to be dealing with all of this on your own. This is exactly the kind of thing we talk through inside the Hypothyroid Recovery Hub, the things nobody tells you until it's already gone too far. Join us: https://www.skool.com/hypothyroid/about​

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