First step complete

We are home!  Thanks for all the prayers, good wishes, and encouraging emails and texts.  Each one might not have gotten a response from me but were appreciated and needed.

In my eyes, surgery was very successful.  The surgeon had anticipated only being able to remove the right side of my thyroid but was able to remove that plus the upper half of my left side.  He also removed 1 lymphnode.  I thought I was prepared for surgery--heck this makes #15 for me-- but I guess I had never had one that was so close to my breathing parts.  The spirometer and I have a love/hate relationship right now.  Because my neck and chest are so swollen, I am not fully expanding my lungs when I breathe therefore increasing risk for pneumonia.  So I diligently breathe in with the machine and proceed to cough my lungs up and feel as though I will rip my neck open :)  Pretty sight, huh?  So far, that has been my biggest hurdle. While in the hospital, my calcium levels did drop but are going to be managed by medicine at home and checked regularly.
We did meet with the heme/onc dr Thursday afternoon.  She was wonderful.  So great that she thought ahead so that I could have my bone marrow biopsy also done while in surgery.  I heard that it can be painful and it is usually done while awake!  Because so much is unknown, she couldn't lay out a definite plan but gave us more of a timeline.  Treatment should begin in 2-3 weeks after getting the results from pathology and my scans.  The PET and CT scan will be sometime this week.  Minimum treatment will consist of 2-3 rounds of chemo plus radiation and will increase as staging progresses.  The pathology report will let them know what type of cells we are dealing with to know which medicines will be used.  80-90% (right now, I don't think statistics apply to me!) are a large, Bcell type that uses 4 chemo meds (I don't know the names specifically but an acronym of CHOP) plus an add on.  The other 10-20% are another type of cells that would use 3 meds plus an add on, the med that is omitted is the med that causes hair loss.  She felt like this still was very treatable and after treatment, little chance of recurrence.  We left there feeling very relieved, encouraged, and confident in her and her team. 
So what are we doing now?  Trying to live life as normal as possible as we WAIT. This is hard for me because normal life consists of working for me and due to the environment, I can't be there.  I love my job and coworkers, so this is going to be very hard for me.  I know there will be days when I feel fine and will want to be doing the normal day-to-day stuff. 
Again, I can't begin to say how overwhelmed we have been by the outpouring of support by everyone.  I have received so many messages from those who don't know me personally but knows someone who knows me or my family.  I have been asked by many if it's okay to add me to prayer lists, and the answer is "Absolutely!"  This is something that we can not go through alone and the more that are supporting us in anyway the easier this will be to get through.  I am holding up well I think mostly because I have nothing for sure to worry about yet.  I had asked many last week to pray for me for some peace, contentment, and understanding during this time until we knew the definite diagnosis. I have felt those prayers and know that until the labs come back, we have done everything that we can do. 
I will continue to keep everyone updated as we know things!