Why I’m building this

In 2017 I had an ultrasound of my neck, then a needle biopsy, and then a conversation I was not ready for. The result came back suspicious for papillary thyroid carcinoma: not a diagnosis, but not a clean answer either.

The recommendation was a thyroidectomy. Remove the gland, and with it the uncertainty. It is a common operation and, by any reasonable measure, a safe one.

What nobody spent much time on was the other side of the ledger. A thyroid you no longer have is a hormone you take every morning for the rest of your life, and a level someone has to keep getting right. That is a long time to be adjusted.

I did not want a second opinion. I wanted to understand the first one.

So I started reading, and I started changing things. How I slept, what I ate, how much I moved, how much I was carrying that I had not admitted was heavy. I went on retreats. Real ones, several of them. I came home each time with something that stuck.

The other thing those years gave me was a habit of asking for the number. Not “is this good for you” but how much, for how long, measured how, and compared against what. Once you start asking that, you notice how rarely anyone selling wellness can answer it.

In the end, further investigation found my nodules benign. That changed what was on the table. Because they were benign, and because they were still there, I was a candidate for something other than surgery.

I had cryoablation instead. No incision, no scar across the throat, and the gland stays. That was the part that mattered to me. It worked.

I was lucky, and “benign” is what made the alternative available. Someone with a malignant result is having a completely different conversation, and I would not want a word of this read as a reason to decline surgery.

The lesson was not to refuse the surgeon. It was that the first path offered is not always the only path, and finding the others is work somebody has to do. That work took me months. I am reasonably determined and I still found it slow, confusing and weirdly private, as though the information existed but was not meant for me.

Nine years on, this is what I am after: good years, and more of them. Still climbing the hill, still thinking clearly at six in the evening, still sleeping properly.

Which is how I ended up trying to book a longevity week, and running straight back into the same wall.

You cannot easily find out what these places cost. You cannot find out whether a doctor is on site all week or on a phone in another country. You cannot find out what is actually measured, what happens to those results after you fly home, or which of the twelve things on the schedule have a published trial behind them and which are simply pleasant.

The prices, where they appear at all, are often described as indicative. The brochures are beautiful. The facts are somewhere behind an enquiry form.

I do not think that is malice. I think it is a category that has always sold discretion, and nobody has yet done the boring work of writing it all down.