Explaining the Thyroid to a 4 year old

By now we knew I was going for surgery so I felt it was time to explain to Lily what was going on. She’s very smart is Lily and likes to know everything. She knew I had a poorly lump in my neck but now I told her they were taking the lump out. We sat on her bed in her room picking out books for bedtime and chatted about the op. This is what I love about Lily, the conversation went like this...

“They’re going to take the lump out of my neck. It’s on a thing in my neck called a thyroid. I’m going to the hospital but I will be able to come home the same day.”

“That’s good Mummy, are you a bit nervous?” 

“Yes, a bit!”

“Well, look Mummy...this is what you need to do. You need to lie down, close your eyes, take a deep breath!” and then raising her arms in the air she said “then you just...let it go!” 

I thought I was going to cry...I hugged her tight. “That’s a really good idea!” I said. I knew what was coming though, and sure enough she stared at my neck and said “what’s a thyroid?” We’ve been talking about the thyroid for months, every appointment, every scan and actually I haven’t got a bloody clue what it is and what it does. All I know is I had a teacher at school when I was 10 and he had a thyroid problem and it used to make him really, really angry and he’d jump up and down and shout until he turned red. I’m not sure what that has to do with it really but that’s all I knew and remembered about the thyroid. I did know that it looked like a butterfly so this is how I explained it to Lily. On her wall she has some wall stickers of butterflies, one of them looks a bit weird so I peeled it off and stuck it to my neck. Lily looked at me like I’d lost the plot. I explained that the thyroid looks like a butterfly, I pointed to it’s bottom wing and explained a lump was growing on the bottom wing of my butterfly so they were going to take the wing away and make it better. If it still wasn’t any better they would then take the rest of the butterfly away. I peeled it off and stuck the butterfly back on the wall. Only now the wall stickers were a combination of butterflies and flying thyroid...brilliant! I’m going to have to take it down at some point now...I can’t look at it without being creeped out by the weird looking butterfly. Lily asked if I’d stick the butterfly on her neck too so I took it back down and stuck it on and she giggled away. 

We talked a bit more about what we would do whilst I was getting better and who would look after her, which was followed by fist pumping the air and shouting “yes!!” Lily was really excited about my surgery it seemed...she couldn’t wait! To her the whole thing was a big adventure and that was OK. I decided that’s how we needed to look at it, as an adventure...to be fair it was going to be a bag of shite but I decided to do as Lily said, take a deep breath, let it go and let the adventure begin!