Day 13: More Than You Ever Wanted to Know About My Health

But not in a disgusting way!

I'm just finding new things out and feeling the urge to talk about them.

As some of you know, I have an under active thyroid. Specifically, I have Hashimoto's disease. This means that my immune system thinks that my thyroid is a foreign body and attacks it. This leads to a swollen thyroid which leads to it under producing the hormones it's supposed to be putting out.

The symptoms for under active thyroid are fun: fatigue, sensitivity to the cold, dry skin, hoarse voice, elevated cholesterol, weight gain and difficulty in losing weight, muscle and joint pain, swelling of the joints, muscle weakness, depression, and memory loss to name a few. Not everyone gets all the symptoms, of course. Mine presented as extreme fatigue and depression - as in, unable, literally unable to get out of bed in the morning. I also gained weight continually, no matter what kinds of diets I tried or how I exercised and have yet to be able to lose it all.

I've been working with my trainer for a couple of years now and while we've made progress, it's stopped. And no, I don't eat perfectly but I eat fairly healthily and I exercise 4-5 days a week, heavy on the cardio. I should be losing weight and I'm not.

So I'm seeing a new doctor. I've seen her once and we went over the problems I'm having. She took blood and when I see her next week we'll talk about my options. I'm not looking for surgery or any sort of 'quick fix' because I know from the past that they're not the answer. I just want to know what's still wrong that what I'm doing isn't working.

In the mean time I've been doing some more reading about my thyroid. Turns out that a lot of people who have Hashimoto's also have Celiac disease. And maybe it's just WebMD-itis, but I read through the symptoms for that and I have several. Some of which, like depression/irritability and joint/muscle pain, I thought were left overs from the thyroid. So that's something I'm going to talk about with the doctor next week. I really don't *want* it to be the reason because a gluten-free diet is basically the only answer and all my favorite foods contain gluten apparently! :(

The other thing I've been looking at is the medicine that I'm on. I take Synthroid, which is a synthetic hormone replacement, to take the place of the hormones my thyroid isn't putting out. I've been on it since I was diagnosed, with increasing dosages as time goes on. That's normal, since the thyroid disease is not something that can be 'repaired'. It's something I'll live with for the rest of my life but given the problems that other people I know have it's not that big a deal. I was under the impression that Synthroid was the best/only option out there. *But*.

There's another thyroid (and I can't tell you how many times I've misspelled thyroid in this post...) replacement called Armour. Which is...look away Muslim and/or Vegan readers!


...desiccated, ground up pig thyroid.


Okay, you guys can look now.

But it seems to work better than the Synthroid for some people. So it's something else that I'm going to mention to my doctor. I thought I was managing my disease, but clearly I've remained ignorant and complacent about a lot of aspects of it. No more.