It is absolutely amazing the number of doctors that write off thyroid problems as nothing. I had the same doctor for about 15 years. When I was about 12 or 13, people use to accuse me of being anorexic. I was always losing weight and if I didn’t eat the second I felt hungry, I would start shaking uncontrollably. I would go to the doctor and tell him what was happening and he would always tell me that it is nothing and just my body going through puberty or else he would say that it was my blood sugar levels and to enlist the help of a nutritionist. As the years passed, I got worse, I was always nauseated and I was throwing up about 2 times per day. Again, I went to my doctor several times and every time I got the same response. I started going to walk in clinics and different doctors and they all said the same thing, that it was nothing. They were treating me like a hypochondriac. When I was 24, I was getting a lot worse, now I was throwing up nearly 5 times per day, I was constantly hungry, and constantly shaking. In a two week period at 24 years old, I lost over 40 pounds without lifting a finger. I was tired and had no energy and I felt like my body was shutting down. I went to my doctor and again got nowhere. I was starting to get really scared at this point, so I started going to even more walk in clinics.
One day I woke up and I was covered in this crazy rash from head to toe, so again I headed to another walk in clinic. Finally I found a doctor who would listen. I didn’t even have to open my mouth; he took one look at me and said that I had a thyroid problem. He took me to the bathroom and showed me just how huge the goiter in my neck was. I never noticed it before. It had been there since seventh grade, so I always just thought I had a fat neck. They diagnosed me as having Graves' Disease and right away I was put on anti-thyroid drugs. Unfortunately, I reacted horribly to the drug and ended up in the hospital with pericarditis. I was told that there is about a 1% chance of this occurring. Pericarditis is when the sac surrounding the heart becomes inflamed. It is extremely painful and very difficult to breathe. It took about 7 months to recover from that. As soon as I ended up with a heart problem they switched me to tapazol, another anti-thyroid drug. My body could tolerate this drug. I was on it for about a year and they still couldn’t get my hyperthyroidism under control. At this point, my eyes were bulging out of my head (Grave’s eye disease). Finally the decision was made to surgically remove my entire thyroid. The goiter in my throat was very large and I was having trouble breathing properly. So, a year after being diagnosed, I was in surgery.
Another hurdle, my surgery was in February and my synthroid dosage was too low until October, so now I have put on almost 60 pounds. No too long after my surgery, my eyes started to sink back in. They didn’t go back to their original position, so about 2 months ago (about 8 months after my thyroid surgery) I had eye lid surgery. They made some incisions on the inside of the lids above the eye ball; this made my eye lids longer. So now, I have no thyroid and my eyes can finally shut all the way. It has been a long road, but I am finally recovering from all of this. I am 25 years old and my body can finally start to feel like it. Now that my thyroid hormone levels are stable (although my body temperature always seems too cold or too hot), my weight has stopped going up. Now I have the difficult challenge of losing 60 pounds.
It has been a long hard fought battle and now I just want to get my body back to normal. The funny thing is that I have been fighting this impossible battle for over 12 years, so I am really not sure what normal is.