When you’re battling with a silent disease like mine, you hear many comments. Some of the more common ones are ones like “are you really that sick?” or “how can you be that tired, you haven’t done anything yet?”. My favorite one is “I understand how you’re feeling.” Unless you are personally dealing with something like this, you don’t truly understand. Let’s back track here…
When I was around twelve, my body went completely out of whack. Now mind you I had many other health issues as a child, but none of them really kept me from living a normal life. Once I hit middle school age however, a lot had changed. I gained a ton of weight in a short amount of time. I had terrible mood swings. I had a lot of anxiety and depression. Every doctor visit just categorized that as teenage hormones. Blood tests were fine, they saw me as a healthy kid, who just ate a lot. What they failed to realize was I was a three-sport athlete, who never had time to herself. I was either at school, practice, or a softball lesson. My mother was a cheerleading coach, my dad was a football and softball coach. Our family was constantly on the go. I never had time to just lay on the couch with a bag of chips and watch TV.
I struggled with this all through middle and high school. At one of my annual physicals, my doctor was checking my neck, and continued to feel the same spot repeatedly. She told me we would be doing some extra blood tests to check my thyroid levels, and that she wanted me to see an ear nose and throat doctor. That day was the start of the rest of my new life.
After months of tests and seeing many doctors, they found out there was more to my problems. I had 13 nodules on my thyroid. In normal people terms, that meant that I had 13 tumors on one organ in my body. Now the thyroid controls an incredible amount of things in my body. Your metabolism, the amount of calcium you get in your body, your mood swings. It controls chemicals in your brain and the rest of your body. On top of the tumors, I found I have an autoimmune disease called Hashimoto’s Thyroiditis. Pretty much it means that your body is fighting against your thyroid, which contributes to the lack of function in the organ. At nineteen years old I had to make the decision if I wanted to remove it then, or wait a few more years and deal with it then. I made one of the biggest decisions of my life and decided to do it then.
February 8th 2011 was the day that my life changed forever. The surgery to remove my thyroid was supposed to be two hours long. It ended up being five hours. The reason being was because my thyroid was stretched, and wrapped around my vocal cords. They got all of it out, and I woke up in a hospital room with a tube in my throat. I stayed there for three days while they monitored my blood consistently. Those three days were the longest I have experienced to date.
Once I came home, my daily life changed. Now because you don’t have the thyroid to regulate the hormones in your body, you have to take a pill that regulates it for you, every day, for the rest of your life. It sucks. Believe me. My problem, is that I have done everything these doctors have asked me to do, and six years later I still don’t feel right.
I’m tired all the time. My emotions can start of happy and do a complete 180 and it can turn bad really quick. Some days I don’t want to get out of bed. My brain fog is so bad sometimes I can’t even remember why I walked into a room. It’s hard.
Believe me when I say I know people have it much worse than me. And I am fortunate that I have people around me that are extremely supportive in what I do. I’m lucky that I have family that is there for me when I need them, most of the time.
To the people that are experiencing the ups and downs of thyroid disease. I totally understand. It definitely is a hard thing dealing with having to be okay, when you know you’re not. I’m here for you. There is such a large community of people just like you who are experiencing the same things you are. I’ll support you too.
