Scars

Hi Car94 and a warm welcome to the Online Community. I myself have a different cancer to you but it may help if I tell you back in 2002 I had a sub-total thyroidectomy. My scar is barely noticeable, measuring about 6 inches. My sister went out and bought me a selection of silk scarves, all lovely, and I never wore any of them!

I see you've joined the supportive Thyroid cancer group where you'll be able to connect with others having the same procedures.

We always suggest you write a little about your journey so far by updating your profile - it helps others when they want to ask questions and also means you don't keep writing the same thing time  and time again.

sending welcoming hugs, B xx

Hi thanks so much! Just updated my profile

Great! I'd never joined a forum of any kind before joining Macmillan and TBH updating my profile here was much easier than writing out my "Goals and Objectives" back in the day!

Hopefully you'll get some answers very soon or you could simply read other posts and hit reply to join in conversations.

Bx

It's really hard to say how much scarring or how noticeable it will be because everybody has differences in the way they heal after surgery. For the most part, our total thyroidectomy scars are usually made into a natural 'crease' on the neck (if the surgeon can find one - my lump was so big that I had no neck wrinkles but that wasn't a good thing though the doc did pretty well estimating where it would be once the lump was gone. Neck direction means you'll have more scarring than those without disections, but for most people, if they protect the scar from the sun for the 6 months or so after surgery (I used buff tubes to cover the scar rather than sun block - some prefer sun block) and if you look after the scar (I was a big user of Biooil but some people do get allergic reactions so you may need to experiment) and now nobody ever spots my scar if I don't pint it out.
For the neck direction, you can reduce the amount of scarring that's visible by getting your hairdresser to give you a cut that doesn't leave your neck on full display. 

I reassure myself that nobody noticed a massive lump sticking out of my neck (including my husband) so why would people spot a bit of light scarring?