In the spring that I graduated high school, I got tired of being sick and tired and got my blood tested. A few weeks later, I was diagnosed with Hashimoto’s disease. Since then, I’ve learned that it was so much more common than I had imagined.

Hashimoto’s disease, or chronic lymphocytic thyroiditis, is an autoimmune disease where the thyroid gland is attacked by your immune system. The thyroid produces hormones that regulate your body’s activities. It is the most common cause of hypothyroidism.

Over time, it’s become an exhausting inconvenience. Every morning, I take medicine which produces hormones since my thyroid is too small to do so. Sometimes, my body gets bursts of the hormones naturally, and my medicine then makes me feel as if I had stuck my fingers into an electrical socket. Yay. Other times, the dosage (which is already wonky because my dosage isn’t made — I have to chop the pills up myself) isn’t enough, so I’m exhausted to the point where I could sleep while standing up.

So how did I know it was time to get my blood tested? Once upon a time, in my senior year of high school, my mom said enough was enough. She had also recently begun treating hypothyroidism, and therefore knew what to look for. So we pulled up a list of symptoms and let me tell you — the list is never ending. I had checked so many off.

Some common symptoms include:

Fatigue and sluggishness — I could get 10 hours of perfect sleep and still come home from school and pass out.

Increased sensitivity to cold — no matter how many layers I wore, my hands and feet were always freezing.

Pale, dry skin — my eczema was so bad that it was all up my arms and throat.

Unexplained weight gain — lol.

Tinnitus – this one still happens to me. The ringing in my ears gets so bad I get physical headaches from it. It’s enough to drive someone crazy – how do you block out a noise that’s coming from inside your ears?

Now, there are many, many more symptoms, but these were just the ones that were most prominent to my case. Another prominent symptom is depression.

Three years later, I could honestly not tell you what all has changed. I still have bad days — today is one of them — where I feel like I could sleep for years. I wake up, take a shower, and nap before class. Then, I fight to stay awake in class. By the time I get home, I’ve already planned my next nap. I have no motivation. Then there are days where I feel on top of the world. The constant flipping between modes is tiring.

All I want is a medicine that will make this stop being a problem. At the same time though, I don’t want to have to take this medicine for the rest of my life, because there have been and always will be days where I forget to do so. I’ll eat breakfast and then realize I haven’t taken my pills for the day. Then I can look forward to feeling like crap. I’m just tired of it.

That being said, if you have any history of thyroid problems in your family, whether Hashimoto’s, hypo- or hyper-thyroidism, go and get your levels checked. This is a crappy quality of life to have to suffer through if there is a solution.