Hi, all. I’d been putting off saying anything about this publicly, but last week, I was diagnosed with papillary thyroid carcinoma.
In terms of how cancer goes, this is one of the most treatable ones out there. The prognosis after successful removal is basically the same as never having had it. Papillary nodules are slow growing and slow spreading, and mine were thankfully detected each at 1mm under the normal threshold for biopsy at their respective TIRADS (“danger”) levels.
(Insert anecdote about advocating for your health here?)
Anyway, along with the pair of confirmed malignant nodules on the right wing of my thyroid, I also have a few smaller unconfirmed but suspicious ones on the left, and so my endocrinologist has recommended a full removal. The final decision will be up to the surgeon. At the time of writing this, I do not yet have a consultation scheduled, and am not sure when that will be.
Long story short, I am doing my best to record what I am able to of Aiko before my surgery date (whenever it might be) as there is a solid chance of permanent vocal changes after the surgery. Best case scenario, my voice recovers after a few weeks. Most likely case, I am unable to perform sustained singing for 6+ months as my throat heals, possibly requiring voice therapy and with noticeable quality changes. Absolute worst case scenario, there is accidental damage to my laryngeal nerve (which lies right under the thyroid) and my voice becomes permanently hoarse.
Perhaps I am over-preparing for a worst case scenario, but Aiko is very near and dear to me and I’ve always been extremely particular about her sound and quality. This has obviously come to shoot me in the foot as I tend to delay and re-record WIP voicebanks without releasing anything. This weekend, I took my aging 2017 PC laptop to a repair shop, hoping to prep for recording work by simply replacing some RAM, the battery, and the boot drive, on which none of my UTAU content was stored. I was assured that cloning the boot SSD would not affect the storage HDD.
Spoiler alert: it did.
I am currently waiting to see if my data has been recovered from the HDD, which could suddenly not be read once the new boot SSD was installed. This contained my WIP Nimbus, Cirrus and Stratus JP VCV and EN Arpasing banks, as well as my omake/exVoice I had recorded so far.
Needless to say, I’m kind of a mess right now.
My surgery may be in 3 weeks as the doctor estimated, or it might not be for a couple of months as the usual turnaround time seems to be. I have no idea or reference point at the time of writing this.
I’m not writing this to receive any pity, mostly just to scream into the void and get a weight off my chest, and also to express why I’ve had to step back from a couple of recent projects. Perhaps my voice and I will recover just fine, and I’ll be able to look back on this post and laugh at myself for being overly worried, or perhaps I’ll ridicule myself for my misplaced priorities. But right now, I have no guarantees to go on and I’m doing my best to do what I can for my most beloved hobby while maintaining some semblance of normalcy in other aspects of my life. It’s only been a week and I already feel incredibly burnt out.
All I can say right now is thank you for reading, and thank you for continuing to support Aiko. I’ll do my best to continue to do so as well.
-Myst
