Rainy day brings green (moss), clean (air) and relief from a health scare

FEW THINGS COULD HAVE BEEN MORE WELCOME this morning than to awaken to the patter of raindrops on my Center Island roof.

My rooftop is metal. When I’m abed in my loft, my head is inches from the sharply sloping knotty-pine ceiling and not much farther from the roof outside. Raindrops are like a percussive lullaby, and morning raindrops mean I have the day off from outdoor projects.

It was a celebratory lie-in for me, reading a good book, sipping good coffee and munching toast. The celebration was two-fold: (1) We really needed the rain on my parched and crispy island, and (2) I don’t have thyroid cancer.

I had returned from Seattle yesterday afternoon, following a Monday fine-needle biopsy of a suspicious lump on my thyroid gland.

The thyroid “nodule” (as the docs called it; a less-alarming word than “lump”?) was among discoveries when I did hospital time last December with multiple scans of my innards. After recovering from the ulcer that prompted emergency surgery on Christmas Day, I had a late-January visit with a Swedish Cancer Institute hematologist to find out if the lesions seen on my spleen were something to worry about (apparently not, he decided).

By comparison, the thyroid nodule sounded minor, and frankly I was fed up with being poked and prodded, so I conveniently forgot about it. But my primary-care physician didn’t, and a few weeks ago he prodded me (there’s that word again) to get another ultrasound look at the thing.

The nodule hadn’t disappeared on its own, and on a standard scale used to judge such things, mine was of a size to prompt a FNA, I learned in a MyChart report.

Had to Google that, of course. “FNA” stands for fine-needle aspiration (poking, what did I expect?). It’s a type of biopsy.

“Biopsy.” There’s an ugly word I hadn’t personally experienced before. It meant I had to be tested for cancer.

To ratchet up my apprehension, my primary-care guy phoned me in person less than an hour after the ultrasound finding posted. He’d never done that before. It was no emergency, but he wanted me to schedule the biopsy soon.

So there I was Monday afternoon at the high-rise Optum clinic at 7th and Madison, just off Interstate 5 in Seattle, getting a needle poked into my neck five times while the radiologist attempted to get enough “stuff” (the actual term the doc used) for a reliable analysis. Ick.

It wasn’t pleasant, and I hope not to repeat it. But he gave me a local anesthetic of lidocaine, the same numbing agent most dentists use these days. So all I felt was some unpleasant prodding. Not much poking. In fact, it was a lot like a dentist visit, blessedly without the noise of the high-speed drill and the occasional whiff of smoke from the grinding of tooth enamel.

Absent any actual cutting, the only bandage I wore home was a standard Band-Aid.

I slept on the couch in daughter Lillian’s Roosevelt-district apartment that night. She and a friend had generously taken me out for dinner and a movie to distract from the worry. The doc had said results could take a week.

Tuesday, I did mainland grocery shopping before returning on a 3 p.m. water taxi to my island. The day was muggy and the air unpleasantly smoky from wildfires in the region. As I awakened from a pre-dinner nap, I heard the first of patters on my roof. Stepping to the door, I relished the smell of the freshly rain-washed air, like the aroma of clean sheets on a clothesline. It was a brief reprise of spring rains that nurtured a healthy crop of berries and seedlings in recent months.

I checked my email and with a mild jolt saw that I had a test result waiting on MyChart. I gulped and steeled myself for the news.

It took a moment for me to wade through medical terminology until the word “benign” jumped out at me.

What a relief. For this resident of a remote little island, a cancer finding could have changed my future. Or the rest of my summer, for sure.

Instead, I’m enjoying this showery Wednesday. Breathing deep. Taking a break from outdoor projects. Writing in my hut on the rocky knoll. My happy place.

As my siblings and I often say, getting old ain’t for sissies. For now, though, I feel good, full of energy — and relieved. Stay healthy, friends.