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.

Live It: My Thyroid Journey Part 4

Thanks for sticking it out this long.  You can catch up on the whole story.

Part 1.
Part 2.
Part 3.

As with any surgery, you wonder what it will be like.  I had well over a month to think about life after surgery.  I've had other surgeries in the past - liver and gall bladder in 2006 and C-section in 2008.  I can tell you that 2 days after my liver surgery I was sweeping off my front porch.  Again, probably not one of the best decisions ever but I was.  The only downside I had to that surgery was that the pain medication really messed with my mind.  It put me into such depressive thoughts that I was scared to take them ever again.

But what would life without a thyroid be like?  Consulting Google again is not the best idea when dealing with medical issues but I did it anyways.  All I read were accounts of people having their thyroid removed and how their lives were worse than before.  I almost called and cancelled the surgery.

My husband talked me down off the ledge and on Monday, November 9th my thyroid was removed.  We spent one night in the hospital.  How did I feel?

It looked like I had sustained a throat punch from a prize fighter.  My throat hurt so bad on the inside. They had a hard time intubating me, possibly from the size of the left side of my thyroid.  Every movement you make, you have to use your neck so it was pain all the time.  There was a huge, huge hard lump under the incision.  I looked like I had swallowed a shoe.  So I guess you could say I felt like I had been run over by a Mack truck.

Recovery was about a week out of work.  I was weak all the time.  I know it was from about a year of no physical activity before the surgery but it was rough.

Once back at work, I tired out easily.  Everything was slow going.  Until the week of Thanksgiving, that is.  That's when things really went south.

Stayed tuned for the final installment of My Thyroid Journey.

Live It: My Thyroid Journey Pt. 3

You can read Part 1 here and Part 2 here.

The two options were ablation or surgery.  My endo suggested we go to meet with the surgeon she recommended just to ask him questions and get a feel of what we could expect.  I was not really taken with the idea of doing the ablation honestly.  It seems to be a very strict protocol before the procedure and then isolation afterwards for a few days. While I was continually moody and cranky and tired and could probably use a few days to myself, that still did not sound enjoyable to me.  Surgery really did not either though.

We met with the surgeon and he recommended that he remove the entire thyroid instead of just the side that most of the nodules were on.  He said he could wait to open me up to make that determination and possibly keep the right side intact.  I would probably still be faced with having hyperthyroidism after the surgery and would have to remain on the methimazole.  He did warn me that if the pathology came back and the suspect cells were something to be worried about, I would still be faced with doing ablation to kill the remainder of the thyroid cells.

I definitely did not want to keep taking that medication.  After Hubz and I talked over everything, I decided to do the surgery.  I did not ask him to try to save the right side of my thyroid either.  These cells and this medication put me in the mindset that I just wanted it all out.

Surgery was set for November and I was completely fine until about two weeks before.

Stayed tuned for Part 4 of My Thyroid Journey.

Live It: My Thyroid Journey Pt. 2

You can read Part 1 here.

My hair stopped falling out.  The weight gain did level off.  But I still felt no better.  My primary care doctor wanted me to just have my thyroid removed totally.  If that happened, I would be placed on synthetic thyroid hormone for the rest of my life.  That’s not a really horrible thing but I know that people on it still have a hard time at first getting their levels regulated and weight gain / inability to lose weight is always an issue.  The thyroid controls so much in your body that I could not imagine not having it even if it wasn’t behaving itself.

All along though I knew my primary and this endo were not on the right track.  You know your own body.  You know when it isn’t working correctly.  The one message I want to share and hope that it gets heard is “you are your own best advocate”.  You know when your body is not working at its maximum potential.  You have to be the one to get this across and try to get heard.

I wasn’t being heard.  It was time for a new doctor.  In August, I met with a new endo and within five minutes of talking to her, she said she did not think I really had Graves.  She took me down the hall and did an ultrasound on my thyroid.  She found nodules.  Nodules can make the body act just like Graves does.  This happened within 5 minutes.  If the first endo had done an ultrasound, I could still have all my hair and not have all of this weight gain to deal with.  This is the number one thing that frustrates me the most.  One test and five minutes could have prevented 8 months of overdosing on potentially harmful medication, hair loss, weight gain, wasted days filled with stress, anxiety and fatigue.

The options for treating these nodules would be to either have radioactive iodine ablation where all thyroid cells are killed off or surgery to remove the nodules or the thyroid.  If I did the ablation I would have to stay away from my daughter for 2-4 days.  And with surgery there are all the regular issues surgery brings.

She sent me for an iodine uptake test where basically you take one radioactive iodine pill and come back the next day for imaging scans.  That test showed that I had multiple nodules on my thyroid and one of them had "suspect cells" that they would need to remove and have pathology run on them.

It was time for me to decide how I wanted to be treated.

Stay tuned for Part 3 of My Thyroid Journey.

Live It: My Thyroid Journey Pt. 1

I have been absent for a while while dealing with health issues but it's been pressing on me to write and share this with you all for a few weeks.

Last November after experiencing some scary heart palpitations, I found out I had hyperthyroidism. My primary care physician first told me I had hyperthyroid and Hashimoto’s Disease which, and I could be wrong, but don’t believe you can be hyper and have Hashi’s.  I have no medical degree but I have never seen that before.  I was sent to an endocrinologist and was then told no Hashi’s but I did have Graves Disease.  Oh yes, Graves.  What a great name for a medical condition, right?

Since my thyroid levels were so high, I was put on twice the manufacturer’s recommended dosage of methimazole, the medication given to treat hyperthyroid issues.  This is not a great medication to be on.  It can affect your liver and having already had liver surgery in the past, I was concerned about staying on this for a long period.  The goal was to try and get my body into remission so the meds could be reduced or dropped completely.  Over the next few months though, I gained back the 20 pounds I had lost before I was diagnosed and then another 20 pounds on top of that.  My hair started falling out in clumps.  It truly looked like I was going through chemo or something.  I lost half of my hair.

The medicine had thrown me into medically-induced hypothyroidism.  I felt so fatigued and moody all the time. I didn’t want to do anything or talk to anyone. Trying to make complete sentences some days was really an effort.

I went back to my endo and she was very wishy-washy about it all.  “Maybe the hair will stop falling out soon.”  “Maybe the weight gain will level off soon.”  “Maybe you should take this much dosage or you might need to take this much.”  I got no real answers and felt no better.

So I did what any medically licensed by Google and WebMD person would do.  I stopped taking the medicine.  Completely.

Read Part 2 of My Thyroid Journey tomorrow.

Read It: Grin with Grace by Kathy Carlton Willis

Grin with Grace.  Do you know what that is?  I knew it was the title of Kathy Carlton Willis’s new bible study book but that’s about it.  I didn’t know it would come to me at a time when I really, I mean, REALLY needed to read it.

What grinning with grace meant to me was something really personal. I had been dealing with a co-worker that I just don’t see eye to eye with.  One day she came to me and asked if I was mad at her.  My initial thought was “yes, I’d love to rip your face off and hand it to you”.  I had been reading Kathy’s book and this woman’s face kept flashing before my eyes.  I stopped and prayed before I spoke.  I even said to her “I’d better pray before I speak so that God can come out.  Otherwise, the world will come out of my mouth and we know the world is a vicious place.”

I asked for grace and wisdom because I remembered one passage from Grin with Grace very vividly:

“So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you:  Take your everyday, ordinary life – your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life – and place it before God as an offering.  Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him.  Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking.  Instead, fix your attention on God.  You’ll be changed from the inside out.  Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it.  Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you.

~Kathy Carlton Willis, Grin with Grace, page 21.

My co-worker and I were able to talk about our issues.  I was able to own up to my part with grace and we both left that day in a much better place.  I don’t know about her but I know I grinned with grace all through that conversation, and I know if I had not read Grin with Grace I probably would still be ready to rip faces off.

More about Grin with Grace

Each chapter features five sections: 

·                     Grin with Grace contains real-life stories and observations. You’ll laugh at the humorous confessions and wacky insights, and relate to Kathy’s transparent honesty. Be inspired to see grace in your everyday life.

·                     Grow with Grace features a grace word study. Kathy examines Bible verses and personalizes the meaning to your situation. Workbook prompts allows you to write down your thoughts as you read along.

·                     Go with Grace offers life application. Pick one action step and make it work for you, or pick all of them—but do something to live out your grace-walk.

·                     Give with Grace advances life application further, equipping you to become an instrument of God’s grace to others. You’ll be inspired to take what you’ve learned and give it away to others. This is when faith becomes ministry—when your focus expands to see the needs of others.

·                     Your Grin with Grace Challenge describes a grace-challenging scenario to give you an opportunity to exercise your newfound grace. It allows for speculation and judgment calls, to prepare you for the what-ifs that happen in life.

Release Date: May 1, 2015

Retail: $14.99
Publisher: AMG
ISBN-10: 0899574785
ISBN-13: 978-0899574783

Praise for the Book:
Grin with Grace is perfect for women on the run, since there is no set daily reading schedule. The blend of humor, transparency, biblical concepts, word studies and opportunities to plug what I learned into my life gave me a fresh approach to doing my devotions or reading a Bible study.
Dr. Thelma Wells (Mama T)
President of A Woman of God Ministries
CEO, That A Girl & Friends Speakers Agency Speaker, Author

Kathy Carlton Willis writes and speaks with a balance of funny and faith—whimsy and wisdom. Not many funny girls also have Bible degrees! Kathy’s a pastor’s wife, which gives her plenty of opportunities to grin with grace. She shines the light on issues that hold women back and inspires their own lightbulb moments. Almost a thousand of Kathy’s articles have been published in books, magazines, newspapers and online publications. Kathy’s tagline describes her best: Light & Lively: His Reflection/Her Laughter. Kathy lives with her pastor/husband, Russ, in Rockdale, Texas.

Where can you find Kathy:

WEBSITE: www.kathycarltonwillis.com

TWITTER: @KCWComm

Live It: But for the grace of God go I.

Last week I went in for my yearly mammogram.  I have reached the age where that is a thing now.  I won’t bore you with all the “ouch that crap hurts” because if you have had it done, you know and if you haven’t, you will know.  The pain is fleeting though so go get yours checked out when you are supposed to.

A couple of days after the exam, I was called and told they had found something.  My boob wasn’t symmetrical.  That’s evidently a thing too.  I said there were a lot of things about me that weren’t symmetrical and no one had ever complained before.  I got no laugh out of that line and was scheduled for more films and possibly an ultrasound. 

Fine.

Panic immediately set in.  All the negative thoughts were there.  I envisioned the worst. 

I reached out to a group of ladies that have, for about the past 10 years, been my sounding board.  You might find it funny that I have only actually met one of these ladies face to face.  Yep, the majority are 100% online friends but I know more about them and they know more about me than people we see every day. 

Immediately, I asked the gals to pray for me.  They did.  Thanks Ladies!  They also told me this was very common and nothing to worry about.  This was great to hear but I really didn’t believe it.  My boobs and I have had a love-hate relationship most of my life. First by just marginally showing up enough so my mortified self had to go with my mother to Sears to buy one of those horrid training bras with the pink and blue tennis rackets on the front.  Why tennis rackets?  Why pink and blue?  Why?  Then they solidified their slacker status by not showing up at all in high school when they could have come in handy but waited until I was 19 to make their appearance.  Then they once again let me down when I had Bean and they decided “no milk for you” was their motto.  So I was a bit leary that they were on the “let’s be okay” bandwagon. 

I went this morning and showed my boobies to one more stranger.  She took two boob-smashing photos and left me in another waiting room.  I stayed there for 30 minutes while watching two clueless 20-somethings on House Hunters complain that they couldn’t find their dream McMansion for $120,000.  Ugh.  Young, dumb idiots, and I bet her boobs will never let her down.

Once I found out which house those dummies picked, I was shuttled off to another room by another stranger for an ultrasound.  I was worried for real then.  She lubed me up and proceeded to take 130 pictures.  (Boob:  Dude, it was like 12.)

Then a lovely soft spoken doctor (with one of the nicest ties I’ve seen) and an eager intern came in for a look.  I was told it was just a pocket of cysts.  Praise God!  The boobs hadn’t let me down!  

Yay! 

While I was getting dressed, I said my thanks to God for a clean bill of health and went to get my car.  I used valet because that’s the treat you give yourself when you have to have your boobs smooshed.  As I waited for my car, I saw something that stopped me in my tracks and put all of this nonsensical worrying in perspective.

A child about the same age as Bean in a wheelchair.  The child was totally bald.  I could not tell if the child was a boy or a girl because cancer had ravaged their little precious body of any distinctive gender features.   The child was wrapped up in a blanket and had the maddest look on their face.  They have every right to be mad really.  They just want to be a kid – to run and play and enjoy summer.  The mother was pushing the wheelchair and waiting for their car too.  She had a smile on her face.  I wondered why she didn’t have the same mad look on her face because I probably would have.  I wouldn’t begrudge her that look if she did have it. 

Her baby is fighting the fight of their lives and all she can do is stand there watching.  I pray that I never know what that feels like.  Their car came and she picked the child up like it was a baby, still bundled up and mad, and placed them in the back seat.  Off they went to face another day. 

Here I am – a grown woman just given a clean bill of health.  I get to leave there and go to work and go home and play with my healthy child.  I don’t have to fight a disease that might get the best of me.  Today I don’t have to help my child through the side effects of chemo or radiation.  Yes, my life might not be what I want it to be.  But I have had one.  I’m not seven and facing death at every turn.  I might not have what I want or not been to the places I want to go but I have had the chance. 

I closed my eyes and prayed.  I prayed for that child.  I prayed for that mother.  I prayed for healing for the child and peace for the mother.  I can’t give them my clean bill of health but I can give them my prayers.

Not sure exactly where I’m going with this piece but I just had to share this.  I was so worried about myself and I’m ok.  But then to be faced with this glimpse into a life I wouldn’t wish on anyone just made me feel like I needed to give praise and thanks and beg for something for someone else.  It is true.  No matter how bad you have it, someone always has it worse. 

But for the grace of God go I.