Tuesday, January 12, 2016

A medical epiphany

So I had an epiphany this morning around 4am (I did sleep some through the night though, thank God).

And my epiphany was:
Maybe it's a thyroid problem.

As morbid or weird as it sounds, for the past couple of years, I've been wondering if I have some sort of autoimmune disease. Trust me, it's not something that a human randomly comes up with to think about - much less me because I believe I have better things to be anxious about - but doing some research on it this morning somehow started pulling things together.

I suppose this whole thing started when my skin became really dry a couple of years ago. I started to have non-fungal rashes (I went to the skin centre to get that checked once). I had bad bouts of bowel problems, sleep problems, anxiety issues, lethargy, very brittle nails, my hair is still falling, and I had some freak problems with my eyes on two separate occasions a few years ago. I went to the doctors once or twice in this period of time and both doctors guessed it might be an autoimmune problem... But I never quite got it followed up on.

Life just gets busy like that.

At one point of time, especially after my jaw surgery, I started reading up on lymphatic problems (as I was looking at how lymphatic drainage could help with the swelling) and that seemed to make sense to me. I was, however, really cautious as we live in an age where there is a lot of random unfounded self-diagnosis with the availability of sites like WebMD. So, I didn't do much about it either.

About a year ago, I bumped into an old friend of mine and somehow as we chatted in the car park she shared with me how much better she was that she found out that she had hypothyroid and she was getting it treated. As she described her symptoms, I couldn't help but constantly think "hey, that's pretty familiar". 

And this morning that meeting came back to me in my epiphany. Maybe that is why I've been feeling so lousy. 

So here I am, having dragged my aching tired body out to the clinic waiting for my turn... Which apparently looks like another 500 people in queue before me or something. I honestly don't know if hypothyroidism is what it is, but part of me will be thankful either way.

I suppose it's a good thing that I have some time out for myself. I brought a book too.


Okay life, what do you have for me today?

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