09/29/2026
No one prepares you for when your surgeon and thyroid cancer/hearing specialist is retiring. 🥹❤️🩹🥹
14 surgeries, and 19 years after Aly’s first set of tubes, we walked out of Dr. Thompson’s office today with a grateful heart, and maybe a tear or two. 🥹
Dr. Thompson helped Aly with 6 sets of tubes (I think) removed her adenoids, and tonsils- and completed her most significant surgery at the time, a tympanoplasty. She had a cholesteatoma, paper patches, thinning ear drums, bi-lateral Eustachian tube dysfunction and received hearing aids by the time she was 15. Little did we know, this would be preparing us for what was to come.
We went to his office one day, thinking that she would likely need another ear surgery due to a spell that she had at home (She was breathing, but unresponsive, looking directly through me, and it sounded like a train was flying by her while her as her sight went black with specks that looked like the sun.)
We were shocked to hear that her ears looked great…. but then he mentioned her lymph nodes were abnormally large and he’d like her to get some testing done, but due to her age, He wasn’t too concerned. At the time, it was extremely rare that 15-year-olds got thyroid cancer…. However, within one week, our whole lives changed forever.
Dr. Thompson called me at 6pm on a Friday night to tell us the results. He stayed on the phone for 30 minutes explaining the journey ahead.
(Side note: crazy enough, the spell was completely unrelated to the cancer and we still don’t know why that happened! It had to be God’s blessing so her cancer would be found.) 🙏
The good news is, We trusted him with our whole heart. We knew that he already treated Aly as if this was his own grand daughter, and we would never need to question this. He always had her best interest at heart.
He would go on to give her a thyroidectomy, and more two lymph node dissections after that. And then, a lingual tonsil biopsy to rule out lymphoma this past December! (Thankfully that was benign!)
Needless to say, we have literally trusted our daughters life in his hands on multiple occasions!
But more than anything, he has always been so kind and took his time to make sure we had our billions of questions answered, too! There was never a doubt how much he cares about his patients. (And Natalie, too!)
We left walking away today like, “now what?” Who is going to perform her next surgery whenever that time comes? And yes, he gave us amazing referrals, but they will never be Dr. Thompson. ❤️🩹🥹❤️🩹
Thank you so much to this incredible doctor who has spent most of his life healing others… and Aly’s whole life, healing her. I hope that everyone is blessed to have a specialist like Dr. Thompson in their life!
We joked that we will hunt him down and he may need to come out of retirement for her next surgery. (Okay, so maybe it wasn’t completely a joke. 😂😂😂)
Best wishes and happy soon-to be- retirement to the best surgeon we could have ever asked for! 🎉🎉🎉🎉
