The northlondonhippy

Archive for September, 2008

This is turn­ing into the diary of the infirm.

Sorry, I know this used to be the cap­i­tal of online fun. Maybe I should bring back the vir­tual black­jack tables? At least the house would always win.

I’m still feel­ing crap. The med­ica­tion I’m tak­ing is pro­vid­ing me with a host of side effects, all of them seri­ously dull and no fun.

I saw my GP again last week, he changed the brand of the meds I’m tak­ing, which has sub­tracted a lot of the nau­sea, but not all of it and I still have the other side effects. Like breath­less­ness, heart pal­pi­ta­tions, dizzi­ness, headaches, tired­ness, con­fu­sion and forgetfulness…need I go on?

My GP ordered more tests, which he says is to rule out some other things, rather than con­firm any­thing he sus­pects. I think that’s sup­posed to be comforting.

My back seems to be hold­ing its own. I still have pain, but I can cope with it. I’m still see­ing the chi­ro­prac­tor, twice a week down from three vis­its and its always bet­ter after an adjust­ment. It tends to slide back a bit in between though, which I think is down to the fact that my thy­roid lev­els aren’t right yet. The inflam­ma­tion is being held at bay, but it’s not dis­ap­pear­ing com­pletely because what­ever orig­i­nally caused it, is still caus­ing it.

My thy­roid lev­els won’t be right for a while, as my GP says the dose I am on now, that is giv­ing me all these fun side effects, will most likely needed to be increased after my next blood test. Dou­bled, actu­ally. I can’t wait.

I haven’t felt like post­ing much lately, which is annoy­ing because there’s loads I’d like to write about, I just don’t have the atten­tion span to focus very long.

For all the jokes and ref­er­ences I’ve made about being mid­dle aged, I’ve never really felt it in my bones. These days, not only do I feel it, I think I look the part too. It’s all dread­fully tedious and I’m bored of it all already.

I liked it bet­ter when I thought I was healthy. Clearly, I wasn’t really healthy, but I thought I was and isn’t that what really matter?

My doc­tor says that once my med­ica­tion is sorted out, I’ll feel bet­ter than ever. Right now, I find that really hard to believe. When you feel shitty every day, its hard to be even a lit­tle bit pos­i­tive about anything.

The fol­low­ing is a hippy health update:

I haven’t men­tioned how I’ve been feel­ing for a bit, because I’ve pretty much been feel­ing the same. There’re two pieces of good news, though…I’ve got a defin­i­tive diag­no­sis. I have some­thing called Hashimoto’s Dis­ease.

Hashimoto’s Dis­ease is an auto-immune dis­or­der, prob­a­bly genetic in ori­gin and it causes my bod­ies T-cells to attack my Thy­roid Gland, result­ing in Hypothy­roidism, which is an under-active Thy­roid and causes all sorts of metab­o­lism problems.

And Dr. Hashimoto is the guy that dis­cov­ered it and it is the first recog­nised auto-immune disorder.

This diag­no­sis ties together all sorts of symp­toms I’ve had over the last 6 months to a year that I hadn’t really put together or even thought were symp­toms of any­thing. I just thought I was get­ting old!

Mainly, it explains the acute inflam­ma­tion in my back, which con­tin­ues to cause me pain, though not nearly as bad as it was when it started. I never thought my back prob­lems would be caused by some­thing big­ger and scarier!

My other symp­toms included loss of energy, appetite and con­cen­tra­tion, poor sleep, a lump in my throat and flut­ters in my chest. I’ve had all of those things to one degree or another and I sim­ply attrib­uted them to mid­dle age and my erratic work and sleep pat­terns. Silly me. I didn’t put any of this together.

When the back trou­ble started, I began treat­ment with a chi­ro­prac­tor, who I credit with help­ing a lot, but I still couldn’t com­pletely shake the pain. After three weeks I saw my GP, because I thought I might have Shin­gles — I had a minor rash on my side. It turned out I didn’t have Shin­gles, but my GP ordered an x-ray (which was neg­a­tive) and a bat­tery of blood tests, which included a test for Thy­roid function.

The test came back and con­firmed my diag­no­sis. My GP also prod­ded my throat and said he could feel my swollen Thy­roid Gland. I had noticed a slight sen­sa­tion when swal­low­ing for a while, but didn’t think any­thing of it. It wasn’t painful, or even uncom­fort­able, it was just different.

I’ve learned a valu­able les­son and that’s to lis­ten more closely to what my body is telling me and to do some­thing about it!

Thank­fully, Hashimoto’s Dis­ease is very treat­able and I will be on a med­ica­tion called Levathy­rox­ine for the rest of my life. It replaces the Thy­roid Hor­mone my body no longer pro­duces and once they get my dosage to the cor­rect level, my body will go back to nor­mal, what­ever nor­mal is…

I’m hav­ing side effects from this med­ica­tion, nau­sea, sweats, and pal­pi­ta­tions mainly, but these should pass soon. I hope.

Left untreated, it could even­tu­ally cause heart fail­ure and death, so its a very good thing my doc­tor caught this. I’m lucky I have a good GP too.

Oh and the other good news is thanks to Hashimoto’s Dis­ease and my cool new daily med­ica­tion, I now get free NHS pre­scrip­tions for life. Now all I need them to do is approve cannabis pre­scrip­tions on the NHS and this dis­ease stops being a curse and it becomes a real blessing!

Any­way kids, your Uncle Hippy is on the mend and it won’t be long before I’m back to my old self and try­ing to touch you all up again!