I’m a 38 year old male who was recently diagnosed with sporadic medullary thyroid cancer. By the time I got to doctor Harari I had already had one surgery to remove my thyroid. After that surgery, my cancer was diagnosed as Medullary. After a second biopsy of a lymph node in my neck came back positive, I was referred to UCLA and Dr. Harari. Working with her has been great. She is very knowledgeable and has a better grasp of MTC than my previous doctors. And she LISTENS! I have a pretty rare cancer, and it requires a lot of research on my part. When I come in with questions or comments about information I’ve gathered, she takes me seriously, and many times can further explain what I’ve read. She also consulted with a colleague in San Francisco who had more experience than she did with this disease. Bottom line, she’s been very thorough.

She sent me through a boatload of scans and tests to determine how far this thing has spread, and they came back pretty clean except for my neck. She performed a modified neck dissection and removed 30 lymph nodes…5 of which came back positive for MTC.

I have had no complications after the surgery. I think that says a lot about Dr. Harari’s skills as surgeon, ’cause from what I understand, it’s a pretty difficult procedure.

I’m still waiting to see how far my calcitonin has dropped…before surgery it was 1500, so we’ll see.

I know it’s a long journey with MTC, and it’s never really cured, so I’m hoping it just grows very slowly and leaves me alone for a very long time.