Emily Saska

For most thyroid patients, the path from diagnosis to treatment moves fast — sometimes too fast to stop and ask whether there's another way. Emily Saska's story started with a back scan. An incidental finding. A nodule she had never felt, never thought about, and never seen coming. Within weeks it was growing rapidly, visibly bulging in her neck, and she was sitting in an exam room being referred directly to a general surgeon — with no mention that any other option existed. Emily went home and Googled. She found the Save Your Thyroid community. She found Dr. Emad Kandil at Tulane University in New Orleans — an hour from her home in Baton Rouge. And she chose nanosecond pulsed field ablation — nsPFA — instead of surgery. The procedure happened on her 37th birthday. Her last memory before counting backwards from 10 was telling Dr. Kandil: happy birthday to me, hope you had your coffee. Three days later she was in Puerto Rico with her family. All she had was a band-aid. Six w…