Live It: My Thyroid Journey Part 5

You can read the other parts here.

Part 1.
Part 2.
Part 3.
Part 4.

Started off the week of Thanksgiving by meeting with my surgeon for my post-op visit.  He told me that the pathology results had come back and everything was benign.  Thank the Lord!  He said that the nodules turned out to be adenomas which is the exact same thing I had on my liver.  He could not think there was any relation to the two things though.  I told him I had started feeling faint and hot all the time and I was having trouble sleeping.  I wondered if my Synthroid prescription was too high.  He told me to contact my endo to see if they could move up my appointment but explained that even if they did labs on me right then, it was too soon after surgery to get good readings on my blood work.

Over the next two days things were just BAD.  I felt so weak all the time.  My heart started racing and feeling like it was flopping.  It's a very strange feeling to explain but my skin felt very light but under that feeling was a feeling of fastness.  The day before Thanksgiving, I was standing talking to some ladies at work.  I started feeling faint and my heart started feeling like it was flopping and stuttering in my chest.  I sat down to see if that would help.  Then I became very hot and started sweating.  The next minute I was freezing and shaking, and then very hot again and then felt like I was going to be sick.  These feelings kept cycling over and over - hot, cold, hot, sick.

Thankfully my primary is right next door to our office so I went and told them I thought something was going on with my heart.  Blood pressure was fine, pulse was slightly fast.  They did an EKG and it was normal.  They really had no idea what was going on.  I explained about my surgery and had been told there could be the possibility of something called a "thyroid dump".  The PA I was seeing that day had never heard of that before and consulted with the staff.  They suggested I contact my endo and explain what they had done that day and how I was feeling.  After getting back to the office and leaving voicemail for my endo, her nurse called me back. Yes, I was probably experiencing a thyroid dump which is where some of the remaining thyroid hormone stored in the fatty cells of your body start to release.  That gets mixed with the synthetic thyroid by prescription and it results in your body once again having too much thyroid hormone that it can handle.  Symptoms of hyperthyroidism return and all you can really do is wait it out.

I spent the remaining part of the holiday weekend on the couch thinking I was dying.  That is not an over-exaggeration either.  Several times I thought "here comes that heart attack" or thought I should get my behind to an ER quickly.  I was told to temporarily stop my Synthroid for a few days.

I did that and rested a lot, and just as quickly as those symptoms had come, then they were gone.

I woke up the following Monday morning feeling great and have continued to feel good ever since.

I have my next endo appointment next week and they will check my levels through more blood work.  I hope we can find the right level of Synthroid soon and I can start trying to get back to myself.

This was all shared with you as a release for myself to get it all out and as a warning to all that read this to be vigilant of your health.  Like I said earlier, you have to be your own advocate.  If you feel that something is not right with your health, start asking questions, reading, educating yourself.  I had always been the type to do whatever the doctor said, to follow blindly.  The problem with that is in any given medical practice, there are so many patients to each doctor.  Maybe things get missed.  Maybe the doctor you are seeing is not the right doctor for you.  If I had followed my instincts about the first endo I saw, I might could have moved onto another one sooner and found these nodules sooner too.  You know when your body isn't working like it should.

Once you lose your health, it is so very hard to get it back and most of the time getting it back isn't even an option.  Don't just sit there and wish things away.  Make yourself a priority and take care of yourself so you can take care of the ones that depend on you.