Levitan's Solo Pod: Adam Has Cancer (But He's Going To Be Totally Fine) -- (Episode 997)

**Adam Levitan** (0:13)
Hello, and welcome to the official establishtherun.com podcast. My name is Adam Levitan. I am one of the co-founders here at ETR. And we are coming off of a preventative, health, victory lap kind of spring. Yes, that's right. Regular listeners of this show know that my personal midlife crisis has not included fast cars or young women or hard drugs.
Instead, my midlife crisis has included things such as voluntary colonoscopies and liquid biopsies and heart scans. Basically, since getting into my late thirties and I'm 43 years old now, for the last few years, I've been on a quest to do everything I can from a health screening, preventative medicine perspective. So, as part of my preventative health quest, I did something called a pre-novo scan back in early April. For anyone who doesn't know what that is, it's a full body MRI. Literally, you go into the MRI tube for 45 minutes or so, they scan everything from your brain down to your feet. The goal is to detect signs of cancer, vascular problems like aneurysms, abnormalities in your organs, you know, a ton of other stuff. So, I did this scan in early April. It came back pretty clean, but it did show a 2.6 centimeter nodule on my thyroid gland in my neck.
Nodule is just another word for an abnormal growth or a lump of tissue. These nodules, thyroid nodules are really common. You know, a ton of people have them. Ton show up on scans like this. Didn't seem like much to worry about, but both the pre-Novo radiologist and my doctor recommended that I should get it ultrasound. I did that in May.
Ultrasound came back TR5, aka the most suspicious for thyroid cancer, which meant that I had to get a biopsy. So a couple weeks go by, I go to the hospital for biopsy. They're like stabbing at my neck with needles over and over to pull cells out of this nodule to test it. After a few days, I got the results. Biopsy came back positive for papillary thyroid cancer.
I think at this point, this is where most people just lose their mind and go into depression or panic or whatever.
I was honestly pretty emotionless. I think for a couple reasons. Well, I mean, first, I'm like always emotionless about everything. I'm like dead inside. I don't know what's wrong with me. But I was pretty emotionless on this. I think for a couple reasons. First, I am not exaggerating when I say that ChatGPT and Quad quite literally saved and are saving my mental health. I basically talked to ChatGPT about health stuff constantly. So of course, I uploaded my Prinova results.
And I was talking to it about that. I uploaded my ultrasound images. By the time I even went to get the biopsy, I literally knew everything there was to know about thyroid cancer. I probably asked ChatGPT hundreds of questions. And like when you're talking to LLMs, no question is too dumb, no question the doctor doesn't have time for, there's no sugar coating like some doctors tend to do. And so after talking to ChatGPT about this for so long, I knew that even if the biopsy did come back malignant, it's very, very uncommon to die from this. Like even when you catch papillary thyroid cancer through symptoms, even if you catch it in the later stages, the 10-year disease-specific survival rate is just incredibly high. And in my specific case, you know, nodule found incidentally, no symptoms, no sign of lymph node spread on the ultrasound, 43 years old, you know, Chachi BT and the doctors think that my 10-year disease-specific survival rate is somewhere around 98 to 99 percent. So all of this is a long way of saying even before I got the biopsy, even before I opened the results, I was really confident I was going to be fine. And then the other reason I haven't been a mess mentally, I think just understanding probability, as I do, it can be a blessing and a curse in real life, you know? On one hand, a lot of people that I tell about this, they're freaked out, you know? I get it, they hear the word cancer, they're freaked out, they start telling me about staying positive, and you got this, and you can beat this. I'm like, yeah, you know, cool, bro, I appreciate it. But you do understand what 98, 99 percent means, right? Like, I'm not trying to be a hard-o, but it has nothing to do with hashtag positivity or some divine intervention.
It's just data and probability. So, the other side of the whole probability thing is like, doctors say stuff to me, you know, 90 percent, this is 90 percent, or this is 80 percent, or in 98 percent of cases, this, this, this. And I mean, when you've played as much poker and DFS as I have, you can remember losing the 80 20s. You know, you vividly remember losing the 90 10s. And yeah, you know, I've lost some 98 2s also, for sure. 2 percent does not mean it never happens. 2 percent means it happens 2 percent of the time. So, you know, it can be a blessing and a curse. Anyway, let me get back on track here with my story. So, now it's confirmed through the biopsy that I have thyroid cancer. This is a somewhat common disease and getting more commonly diagnosed as more people like me do more scans. There is a hospital here in Colorado called University of Colorado Anschutz. They literally have a full blown thyroid cancer team, surgeons, endocrinologists, PAs, students. So, I get into this clinic. They were incredible. I mean, so organized and like knowledgeable. They recommended removing the right side of my thyroid gland only.