The northlondonhippy

Archive for the ‘Hashimoto’s Disease’ Category

As part of my never-ending quest to seek noth­ing but the truth, I’ve decided to pro­vide the only gen­uinely hon­est review the decade that’s nearly finished.

It fuck­ing sucked. Really, it did. I’ll be glad to see the back of it.

Besides iPods, name one good thing about the noughties? Even its nick­name is pathet­i­cally lame.

The decade started with the Mil­len­nium, which was sup­posed to be the biggest cel­e­bra­tion of all time. I spent the night in cen­tral Lon­don, on the River Thames, broad­cast­ing live to all over the world. Maybe you saw me there, I was in charge of a broad­cast tent near Lam­beth Bridge, block­ing people’s views of the fire­works and River of Fire.

Ha, the River of Fire was the first major dis­ap­point­ment of many in the noughties, a damp squib rather than spec­tac­u­lar and a giant let down for those who braved the cold to wit­ness it. I’ve never heard such a loud, col­lec­tive, “is that really it?” in my life.

Lon­don crowds can be drunken and angry and the night of the Mil­len­nium was no excep­tion. As the clock struck mid­night and I was trans­mit­ting live on behalf of four dif­fer­ent for­eign broad­cast­ers, some­one unplugged our gen­er­a­tor cable and every­thing went dark.  

Don’t worry, one of the tech­ni­cians man­aged to get it recon­nected and it all worked, though the cables were cov­ered with human urine, which wasn’t so pleas­ant for the engi­neer. On top of that, the crowd attacked us and tried to steal our expen­sive TV gear. I can remem­ber smack­ing peo­ples’ arms and hands away from tripods and lights as the fire­works began.

We were all ready for the Y2K bug, a pecu­liar glitch in some older com­put­ers that pre­vented it for han­dling 4-digit years, mean­ing some unpatched com­put­ers would think it was 1900, not the year 2000. We expected the tele­phone net­work to col­lapse, the power grid to crash, along with all the jumbo jets fly­ing overhead.

It didn’t hap­pen, noth­ing hap­pened, cri­sis averted.

But that didn’t mean the noughties were cri­sis free, because less than a year later, George W. (for What the fuck?) Bush stole the elec­tion and became the most pow­er­ful sub-normally intel­li­gent per­son in his­tory. His pres­i­dency dom­i­nated the decade and his poli­cies made the world a much shit­tier place.

Think for a sec­ond, if Al Gore had claimed the pres­i­dency instead. He should have won it, he did win it, but the Supreme Court had other ideas.

Do you think we’d be in Iraq if Gore had two terms in the White House? Prob­a­bly not, but then we most likely wouldn’t have Barack Obama now.

Who’s to say?

The Bush pres­i­dency was built on the foun­da­tion of the Neo-Conservative moment and the Project for a New Amer­i­can Cen­tury. How’d all that turn out?

Let’s see, the entire econ­omy melted down to near col­lapse and we seem to be engaged in George Orwell’s never-ending war while his Big Brother keeps track of our every thought and action.

Cool.

Bush was stu­pid, his advi­sors no smarter. They dug one stu­pid hole after another, each a lit­tle deeper than the last.

When the attacks of 11th Sep­tem­ber 2001 took place, you couldn’t imag­ine a worse com­man­der and chief to have at the helm, unless you enjoy children’s books about pet goats, in which case he would be your num­ber one choice.

9/11 changed every­thing, but the real shock and awe was how we felt as we watched the twin tow­ers come crash­ing to the ground.

I’m old enough to remem­ber when the World Trade Cen­tre was built. I’d been lucky enough to visit the obser­va­tion deck more than once, its a view you wouldn’t be able to dupli­cate again today with­out a helicopter.

We were dev­as­tated by those attacks, fiendishly sim­ple, yet exe­cuted to max­i­mum effect. I remem­ber think­ing that this was the begin­ning of the end of west­ern civil­i­sa­tion and soon we would all be crawl­ing through noth­ing but rub­ble, drink­ing brack­ish water from pud­dles in the streets.

How wrong I was!

9/11 was a blip, a lucky shot, a once in a life­time ter­ror strike from a group whose suc­cess exceeded even their own expec­ta­tions. I’m sure they didn’t think the entire world would change so rad­i­cally as a result of their actions, but change it did.

Keep­ing us secure became the num­ber one pri­or­ity, the cost being a dra­matic reduc­tion in our lib­erty and per­sonal free­doms. Any extreme, rad­i­cal action taken by a gov­ern­ment could and would be jus­ti­fied by tag­ging it with an anti-terror bent.

Do you want to mon­i­tor all tele­phone calls and email mes­sages? No problem.

Do you need my bank­ing and credit his­tory before I get on a plane? Sure thing!

How about my shoes, should I take them off too? Gosh, hope I don’t have holes in my socks!

Think how quickly we all sim­ply adapted to these new real­i­ties, we made hardly a peep as our civil lib­er­ties were sys­tem­at­i­cally stripped away.

Its become such a farce now, here in Lon­don you prac­ti­cally can’t even take a pho­to­graph in a pub­lic place with­out the police swoop­ing down on you like you’re Mohammed Atta, scop­ing out another attack.

Think that’s good for busi­ness and tourism? Think again?

Ter­ror is not the only thing that’s been scar­ing us in the last ten years, as the environment’s been on our minds too. You won’t see any gov­ern­ment declar­ing war on cli­mate change, even though its prob­a­bly more of a threat to more peo­ple than ter­ror­ism could ever be.

The effects of cli­mate change are appar­ent to any­one who can be both­ered to look, yet there are peo­ple out there in the world who try to deny this inevitabil­ity. If you tried to deny the threat of ter­ror, you would be labelled a trai­tor, but being a climate-change doubter will not earn you the same label.

Its prob­a­bly too late to slow down cli­mate change because we pissed away the last decade argu­ing about it. It would be funny, if it weren’t so damn tragic as the recent Copen­hagen Cli­mate Sum­mit heartily illustrated.

The wars in the last ten years have been quite tragic too, espe­cially the two major con­flicts insti­gated by the West, Iraq and Afghanistan.

The war in Iraq was jus­ti­fied with false pre­tences and bla­tant, pre-meditated lies. I knew there were no weapons of mass destruc­tion in Iraq and I had no access to any of the intel­li­gence avail­able to our lead­ers. They knew it too, but made up a bunch of non­sense any way.

I can remem­ber being the only idiot in the world who thought that Amer­ica and Britain wouldn’t go to war in Iraq. I gen­uinely believed they had no grounds to ini­ti­ate a con­flict and that they would back down at the last minute. I don’t think I’ve ever been more wrong, but not as wrong as launch­ing that ille­gal and point­less war.

George W (for War Crim­i­nal) Bush and Tony Blair should both be sit­ting in prison cells in The Hague, await­ing their tri­als for crimes against human­ity, but no one has the fuck­ing balls to send them both there. The Inter­na­tional Court should have charged them already, even if extra­di­tion would never hap­pen. They both should pay for their crimes and sins.

But they won’t.

How many inno­cent lives have been lost in that point­less war? Iraq was far from per­fect before the “allies” invaded, but the elec­tric­ity flowed, the streets were safe and Iraq still had an edu­cated, func­tional mid­dle class.

I’m not a Sad­dam Hus­sein apol­o­gist, the guy was a nasty piece of work, repres­sive, iron fisted, unpleas­ant and vicious. But so what? Lots of coun­tries are lead by shit­bags, we don’t invade them and impose regime change just because we feel like it.

Regime change on its own is not a valid rea­son for war. In the case of Iraq, it turns out it was the only reason.

Sad­dam Hus­sein got strung up in a hastily organ­ised hang­ing. There’s mobile phone video of it on the inter­net, that I’m sure you’ve seen by now. It was a very undig­ni­fied end for an odi­ous, hor­ri­ble man. Though back in the 1970s, Sad­dam was friendly with Amer­ica and funded by them, because he opposed Iran.

Things change, shit happens.

Afghanistan is a dif­fer­ent shade of grey.

After 9/11, there was some sense in going into Afghanistan since that’s where the ter­ror bases and train­ing camps were. That’s also where the leader of the bad guys lived, oh what’s his name again?

Osama some­thing or other.

They had the chance to cap­ture or kill him in Tora Bora and blew it. He’s still allegedly alive and on the run in the bor­der area between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The prob­lem with Afghanistan is after they chased Al Qaeda out, they were left fight­ing the Tal­iban. Big coun­tries like Amer­ica are crappy at fight­ing insur­gen­cies and guer­rilla wars, see Viet­nam for proof. They’ve been dragged deeper into a civil con­flict than they need to be.

Today, Afghanistan is a law­less basket-case of a nation, with a cor­rupt, inef­fec­tual gov­ern­ment at its cen­tre and pow­er­ful war lords scat­tered through­out the country.

Pres­i­dent Obama seems to think more troops will help and the decade is end­ing with him announc­ing fur­ther deployments.

When will they ever learn?

How’s never sound?

And speak­ing of America’s first black pres­i­dent, Barack Obama is one of the good things to come out of the noughties, but he wouldn’t have been pos­si­ble if it weren’t for George W. (Where’d he go?) Bush. Bush paved the way for Obama, with his stu­pid­ity, mis­takes and far right ideals.

Whether you agree with Obama’s poli­cies or not, hav­ing a mixed race pres­i­dent in Amer­ica is good for the entire world. I never thought I would see it in my life­time, and like most peo­ple I was moved deeply by his election.

Do I think he’s doing a good job? Its way too early to tell. He hasn’t even been in office for an entire year yet. We should give the guy a chance. Ask me again in 3–7 years, when he’s fin­ished and I’ll have enough infor­ma­tion to form an opin­ion. Clearly, I wasn’t a vot­ing mem­ber of the Nobel panel, because I never would have given the prize to Barack, at least not yet, anyway.

Per­son­ally, it wasn’t such a hot decade for me either. Both of my par­ents passed away, my father in 2004 and my mother in 2008. I miss them both every day.

This was the decade I well and truly entered mid­dle age. I’m going to be forty-fucking-seven next month. The last decade saw me diag­nosed with a stu­pid ill­ness and I had a sus­tained period of unem­ploy­ment while I was between jobs.

The ill­ness, Hashimoto’s Dis­ease, is allegedly under con­trol and I did man­age to secure gain­ful employ­ment, for which I am very thank­ful, but nei­ther period was par­tic­u­larly pleas­ant for me.

The progress of tech­nol­ogy is one good thing to come from the last decade, I’ve got the some of the coolest toys I’ve ever owned cur­rently in my possession.

I’m on my 3rd iMac, the lat­est a 27” beast with a quad-core proces­sor that is light­en­ing fast, its like hav­ing a styl­ish super­com­puter parked on my desk.

By far, the most amaz­ing thing I own is my iPhone 3GS, it is a gad­get of unri­valled beauty, power and use­ful­ness. If I had to choose one piece of kit that’s rev­o­lu­tionised my life, its my iPhone. It does more than I could have ever imag­ined and its abil­i­ties just keep grow­ing with every app I install.

Cit­i­zen jour­nal­ism came of age in the noughties, with web­sites sim­i­lar to this one spring­ing up at a rapid rate. The word “blog” didn’t even exist ten years ago and now there are mil­lions of them.

Blog­ging came along when I needed it most, I started this one nearly 6 years ago dur­ing my dark and depress­ing period of unemployment.

Blog­ging gave me some­thing to do, some­thing to focus on, some­thing to make me feel like I was still a func­tion­ing mem­ber of soci­ety. I had a way to con­tribute, a way to par­tic­i­pate. Some­how, I still mat­tered, even if I felt like I didn’t.

Blog­ging may have saved my life. I would have con­tin­ued to sink deeper had I not dis­cov­ered Blogspot back in 2004. 

And that’s where you all come in.

With­out an audi­ence, blog­ging is a bit point­less and while I am still not and will prob­a­bly never be main­stream, I’ve had a level of sup­port and inter­est that still astounds me. I’m thank­ful for every vis­i­tor I’ve ever had who has dropped by and hung out with me virtually.

With­out all of you, I’d just be some guy writ­ing long­winded essays for my own amuse­ment. Ok, even with you all around, that state­ment is true, but its still bet­ter for hav­ing you all here.

Thanks very much for stop­ping by, you’ll always find a warm wel­come here and I always put out on the first date.

I wish each and every one of you the very best of the hol­i­day sea­son. I hope the next decade sees all your hopes and dreams come true.

PS
I’m sure there’s plenty of stuff I left out of my review of the decade, but this short video review from Newsweek Mag­a­zine should fill in many of the gaps. Its quite US-centric, but its only 7 min­utes long, so enjoy!

So Mrs. Hippy turns to me last night and says, “Don’t you post on your blog any more?”

She was surf­ing the inter­net on her iPod Touch, which she does quite a bit, pre­fer­ring it to using our iMac.

“Of course I do”, I said slightly defen­sively, try­ing to remem­ber when I last posted some­thing here. I had to check.

It was three weeks ago. That’s long, even by my some­what lax stan­dards. So what have I been up to in that time?

I was kind of hop­ing you could tell me.

I haven’t been work­ing that much. I haven’t been doing much of any­thing, if you must know. I think I am per­fect­ing the art of being and noth­ing­ness. I’m not even sure if I exist any more or even ever existed in the first place.

I might not even be fic­tional. I could just be imag­i­nary, liv­ing only in your mind.

You’re star­ing at a blank screen right now, only your mind thinks you are see­ing words writ­ten by some weird make-believe, north London-based hippy. How’s your imag­i­nary grammar?

See, this is what hap­pens when you start the day with a strong cof­fee and a skunky spliff pep­pered with bubble-hash. Every­one should start their day this way.

I spend inor­di­nate amounts of time sim­ply lost in thought. I dis­ap­pear into my own lit­tle Utopia, where I right the world’s wrongs and allow my cre­ativ­ity to flow freely.

I used to do all that in the real world, but at some point, I stopped.

Oh I’ve worked out when it stopped and why. It was when I first got sick with my stu­pid Hashimoto’s Dis­ease a cou­ple of years ago. I didn’t realise it at the time, it prob­a­bly took another year before I twigged that some­thing was actu­ally phys­i­cally wrong with me, but in ret­ro­spect, it all fits.

Between 2004 and 2007, I wrote 2 nov­els and was rea­son­ably pro­lific here on my web­site too. Towards the end of that period, the 2nd book fiz­zled out while I was writ­ing it and remains one chap­ter shy of being com­plete. The first book was pub­lished, but I didn’t do enough to pro­mote it and it lan­guishes on vir­tual shelves, unread.

The first book was nearly com­mis­sioned as a TV series too, but the media is a fickle and fucked up mis­tress. The guy who liked it and could have com­mis­sioned it with a flick of his pen, moved on; his replace­ments were far less enthu­si­as­tic and the pos­si­bil­ity of pro­duc­ing the series faded away.

Rather than con­tinue to plug away try­ing to do some­thing with it, I let it go too. At the time, I just thought I had lost my enthu­si­asm for the project, but in truth, it was prob­a­bly my ill health that robbed me of my fire.

I haven’t done much of any­thing since.

Of course, that’s not strictly true as I still work (mostly) full time and I do post the odd piece here, but my out­put is not even close to the lev­els I reached a few years ago.

I’m still being treated for the Hashimoto’s Dis­ease and my doc­tor is still adjust­ing my med­ica­tion lev­els. If they ever get it right, I should feel bet­ter and be back to my old self. That’s what they tell me, anyway.

In the mean time, I’ll con­tinue to dis­tract myself with my vivid imag­i­na­tion and soft drugs.

Now, aren’t you glad Mrs. Hippy asked if I still post here? Blame her for the 5 min­utes of your life I just wasted, not me.

I haven’t put any­thing new up here in a cou­ple of weeks, so I guess I should just post something.

This is that some­thing, or rather it will be when I fin­ish it.

I’ve only just started and I don’t know where this is going, so how will I know when its finished?

I’m still not feel­ing 100%, so this could turn into a hippy health bul­letin. There’s a lit­tle bit to report.

After count­less treat­ments with my chi­ro­prac­tor, my back is now 99.9% pain free. I’m sleep­ing well and mov­ing well.

I’m still feel­ing list­less and occa­sion­ally a bit breath­less, but I saw an endocri­nol­o­gist this week who explained why and made a rec­om­men­da­tion that should help.

With thy­roid prob­lems, like my Hashimoto’s Dis­ease, your blood is tested for two things, your T4 lev­els, which is the actual thy­roid hor­mone and your TSH, which is Thy­roid Stim­u­lat­ing Hor­mone and made by your pitu­itary gland.

While my T4 level was good, my TSH level is still on the high side and should be lower. Low­er­ing it involves increas­ing my dose of med­ica­tion again and another blood test in a month or so. I’m going to go see my GP next week to sort all that out and hope­fully I’l be feel­ing some ben­e­fits in a cou­ple of weeks.

That wasn’t much of an update, was it?

How about an update on my site?

If you haven’t noticed, even when I’m not putting new posts up here, I am still adding qual­ity content…well qual­ity if you are inter­ested in my musi­cal tastes or what I had for break­fast. I’m talk­ing about my Last FM playlist and my most recent Tweets.

The Last FM wid­get on the right, shows you the last hand­ful of songs I’ve lis­tened to from my home media cen­tre, my iMac and my iPhone. It also tells you when I was lis­ten­ing, so you can keep up with it in real time. I don’t know why you would want to, but you can if you like.

I’m still enjoy­ing Twit­ter and I do tweet a fair amount daily, often at weird times, like the mid­dle of the night or early morn­ing. I’m some­times around dur­ing the day and at night, it depends on my weird sched­ule. I tweet all sort of ran­dom crap, from inter­est­ing links to odd and sur­real jokes.

Today, just for fun, I started using a hash­tag for a vir­tual Glas­ton­bury fes­ti­val online — #vir­tu­al­glasto — for peo­ple like me who will watch from my sofa, shielded from the ele­ments and poorly cooked veg­gie burg­ers. I’m actu­ally look­ing for­ward to Spring­steen on Sat­ur­day night and I hope the BBC don’t fuck me over and only show a cou­ple of songs. We want the whole god­damn set, god­damn it!

Mainly, I’m post­ing today because I’ve been get­ting so many new vis­i­tors. I’ve had another sig­nif­i­cant rise.

This is to let all you new vis­i­tors know that I’m alive and well and liv­ing in north Lon­don, just like always. Keep book­mark­ing me or grab­bing the RSS feed and before you know it, I’ll post some­thing amaz­ing that will inform, enter­tain and amuse.

Just not today.

I think I’m fin­ished now.

Its not lost on me that I haven’t posted any­thing here in an absolute age and a half. I’m all too aware of it.

I haven’t been so well for the last cou­ple of weeks. Hey ho.

I’m wait­ing for the results of another blood test, that I had been putting off, but a few days ago, I had a cou­ple of litres sucked out of my arm.

Ok, it seemed like litres, I didn’t look. I don’t like blood, espe­cially my own if its not deep inside my veins.

The rea­son I’ve been putting it off is because my reg­u­lar GP of nearly a dozen years is now on long-term sick leave and get­ting a blood test meant see­ing a brand new doctor.

The new doc­tor and I didn’t get off to a great start. He took my blood pres­sure using some fancy auto­mated gizmo and when he checked the read­ing, the expres­sion on his face told me it wasn’t good.

My mother suf­fered from high blood pres­sure, took med­ica­tion for it and was mon­i­tored reg­u­larly. With that in mind, I’ve always kept a close eye on mine, and thank­fully it has con­sis­tently been low, 110/70 which for an over­sized, middled-aged smoker is pretty damn good.

The elec­tronic gizmo was show­ing 170/110, which is not good. Its about as far from good as you can be, its “call an ambu­lance now” good.

I was incred­u­lous of this read­ing straight away and told him I’m con­sis­tently 110/70, young doc­tor new guy looked like he going to shit him­self. I asked him to take it again with an old style, man­ual sphygmomanometer.

He had to go find one and I was momen­tar­ily left alone, my mind rac­ing to the obvi­ous, yet slim pos­si­bil­ity that some­thing changed with my blood pressure.

It could explain why I was feel­ing so shitty again.

The new doc­tor guy returned with an old-school blood pres­sure cuff, quickly wrapped it around my arm then pumped the squeezey ball for all he was worth. As he let the air out and took the read­ing, his con­cerned expres­sion relaxed into a very slight grin and I knew it was fine.

And that’s all he said, “its fine”. He didn’t even share the cor­rect, final score with me and I think I know why.

It was 110/70, just like I told him it should and would be.

Doc­tors don’t like it when you know more than they do, even if it is some­thing as per­sonal as your own damn blood pres­sure. Espe­cially, younger, inex­pe­ri­enced and inse­cure doc­tors, like this one, who I unin­ten­tion­ally put on his back foot.

It would have been eas­ier if he just got it right the first time, but that’s true of just about every­thing any­one gets wrong, ever.

I told him I had Hashimoto’s and needed to get my thy­roid lev­els checked, though I said “T4 lev­els” just to be snarky and this time it was inten­tional. To be fair, this was right after he told me smok­ing cig­a­rettes was bad for me, like he was the first per­son to share that par­tic­u­lar pearl of wisdom.

“Well, gee whil­lik­ers, doc, they’re bad for you? I did not know that. Next you’re gonna tell me unpro­tected anal sex with crack whores is bad for me! I did not know that, either.”

He asked me what my symp­toms were and I told him: breath­less­ness, like try­ing to catch your breath on a cold day with­out any exer­tion, very occa­sional, but notice­able heart pal­pi­ta­tions, alter­nat­ing sweats and chills, a big lack of energy and worst of all, my back prob­lems have returned.

When I men­tioned my back prob­lem, he looked at me quizzi­cally and I had to explain to him how I was suf­fer­ing from inflam­ma­tion in the joints of my spine, which were light­ing up nerves in my leg, sci­atic really. I had to go to explain that one of the symp­toms of Hashimoto’s is inflamed joints as attrib­uted by my reg­u­lar GP last summer.

All of this started last sum­mer when my back gave out and for around a fort­night I could barely walk. I got over it and haven’t had any real back prob­lems since, just the occa­sional, iso­lated twinge, but noth­ing of any concern.

Until about 2 weeks ago, when I started get­ting severe pain shoot­ing down my right leg, mainly in bed and bad enough to wake me up. I haven’t really slept more than 3 con­tin­u­ous hours since then, though often I wake up, put an ice pack on my back, or take a hor­ri­ble codeine pill or both, and go back to sleep.

I saw my chi­ro­prac­tor three times last week, which improved it slightly. Since then, I’ve worked a cou­ple of nights and its become bad again. Sit­ting in a shitty office chair for 12 hours will do that to you.

And because of the bank hol­i­day week­end, I can’t see my chi­ro­prac­tor again until Tues­day, which is also bad.

Moan, moan, moan, I’m just a big hippy baby.

I left the doctor’s office with a blood test form, with more boxes checked than I ever thought pos­si­ble, hence the litres of blood extracted. He’s run­ning every test imag­in­able, which is cool, but he did it out of fear, not because he thought there was any­thing par­tic­u­larly wrong with me.

He didn’t really answer my ques­tion about the pos­si­bil­ity of my thy­roid lev­els drop­ping again, requir­ing an increase in my daily dose of levothy­rox­ine. I don’t think he knew the answer. I don’t know either, but right now, its my best and only guess.

I was told by my reg­u­lar (and much missed) GP, that once my dosage was adjusted prop­erly, I would “feel like a new per­son”. That hasn’t hap­pened yet and I’ve reached the point where I don’t think I ever will.

Yep, all of this has me down. I am bored with hav­ing health prob­lems, its tedious always being asked with deep con­cern “how are you? no really, how are you?” I know peo­ple mean it and its not that I don’t appre­ci­ate their con­cern, I just don’t like hav­ing to answer it over and over again.

Mainly I’m bored with feel­ing like shit all the time. Its mak­ing me think all sorts of things, like: this is my life now, my best days are behind me, I’ve achieved noth­ing with my life.

All sorts of uplift­ing shit, really!

Just check out the title of this post, “Run­ning out the clock”. That’s kind of a downer, isn’t it? Now that you know the context.

That’s how I feel right now, like I am just run­ning out the clock, on those last few decades/years/months/days/hours/minutes/seconds (delete as appro­pri­ate) that I have left.

It doesn’t mat­ter if its true, I mean of course its true, its true for every­one, but what mat­ters I guess is that its how I feel right now. And I don’t feel like I have decades or years.

I should point out I have no med­ical evi­dence to sug­gest I am going to die any time soon and in actual fact, ratio­nally I don’t believe I am going to die any time soon. I’m still talk­ing about how I feel.

Emo­tion­ally.

Now, this is the part where I’m sup­posed to remind you (and myself) that I’ve always been a sur­vivor and blah blah, I’ve come through this and I’ve come through that, but again that’s not how I feel.

I feel like I haven’t got any fight left in me, but that’s prob­a­bly just the Hashimoto’s talk­ing. I really do feel like my energy is zapped most of the time and doing the sim­plest things takes tremen­dous amounts of effort.

With that in mind, think how daunt­ing any­thing com­plex must seem to me at the moment, like nego­ti­at­ing my way through the NHS to a bet­ter diag­no­sis and treatment.

Either I need a sim­ple adjust­ment to my thy­roid meds or some­thing else is wrong. I can just about cope with another increase in my dosage and the addi­tional tests required, but any­thing more than that and I don’t think I can be bothered.

Happy days.

I liked it bet­ter when I was the king of fun, but if I am going to get nos­tal­gic, I might as well lament over how much I miss my beloved fresh and legal magic mush­rooms and I still curse the gov­ern­ment for ban­ning them.

What’s the con­nec­tion? Right now, I would really ben­e­fit from a decent, old fash­ioned shroom trip. An after­noon shroomed to the gills would do more for me than 10 years of psy­chother­apy ever could. And it would be cheaper, too.

Six months ago I was diag­nosed with Hashimoto’s Dis­ease, oth­er­wise known as Chronic Thy­roidi­tis. At the time I didn’t really grasp the sig­nif­i­cance or seri­ous­ness of my diagnosis.

I do now.

I’ve prob­a­bly had this stu­pid dis­ease for a while, longer than I’ve known. I had symp­toms that I didn’t know were symp­toms for at least a year prior to being told of the cause.

I just thought I was get­ting old.

I am get­ting old, but age was not caus­ing my prob­lems, my use­less thy­roid was…and is.

I’m still not well. I find myself say­ing that a lot lately, in response to peo­ple ask­ing me why I look tired, or pale.

I’ve been under­go­ing treat­ment for Hashimoto’s since my diag­no­sis. Treat­ment comes in the form of a small pill taken daily to replace the thy­roid hor­mone my body no longer manufactures.

The side effects caused by the pills are very sim­i­lar to the symp­toms of the dis­ease. I get heart pal­pi­ta­tions, breath­less­ness, headaches, dizzi­ness, light-headedness and these get worse every time the dosage is raised.

The dosage gets raised every cou­ple of months as I am still not on a ther­a­peu­ti­cally effec­tive level yet. I started out on 25mg, then went to 50mg and now I am on 100mg of Levothy­rox­ine. Its about to be raised again, prob­a­bly to 150mg, though I am await­ing for the results of a blood test for confirmation.

Lately, extreme exhaus­tion and lethargy have been added to the mix. I con­stantly crave sleep, but I don’t sleep deeply or for very long. I get phys­i­cally tired very eas­ily and don’t have any of my usual stamina.

My nor­mal walk to my local high­street used to take me well under 10 min­utes, it now takes me closer to 15 and the return jour­ney is stretch­ing to the 20 minute mark.

I’m hav­ing con­cen­tra­tion prob­lems too. “Brain fog” is another symp­tom and there’s a real pea-souper in my head most of the time. I find it dif­fi­cult pay­ing atten­tion to peo­ple when they tell me any­thing com­plex, my mind wan­ders and I am eas­ily dis­tracted. The same is true of my read­ing com­pre­hen­sion, if a para­graph drags on too long, as this one seems to be doing, I for­get what it says.

I get waves of nau­sea, my appetite vac­il­lates between hav­ing none at all, to sud­denly being rav­en­ous and I’ve been hav­ing mood swings too.

All of this sucks the big one in a very real, demon­stra­ble way and I am tired of it.

To com­pli­cate mat­ters, I haven’t been hav­ing much fun with the NHS.

My GP referred me to a spe­cial­ist and after wait­ing months for an appoint­ment, I ended up leav­ing the clinic with­out see­ing the con­sul­tant endocri­nol­o­gist. The clinic was over­sub­scribed, there weren’t any seats in the wait­ing room, the nurses were surly and rude and after wait­ing way too long, I left.

I did receive a let­ter of apol­ogy from the con­sul­tant for my poor treat­ment, but that is a small con­so­la­tion. The entire expe­ri­ence left me with a bad taste in my mouth and no desire to ever return to that clinic.

It gets even worse, my reg­u­lar GP, who I have been see­ing for nearly a dozen years has been hav­ing health prob­lems of his own. He’s cut back his hours and for the last sev­eral weeks, I’ve been unable to see him. I finally gave up and saw the surgery’s senior partner.

The senior part­ner imme­di­ately said she would take over man­ag­ing my care, which makes me think my reg­u­lar doc­tor won’t be back full time any time soon.

Being sick seems to be hard work and I worry if I ever had some­thing seri­ously big wrong with me that I wouldn’t have the patience to fight my way through the sys­tem to get the treat­ment I would need to survive.

And speak­ing of sur­vival, peo­ple can and do die from Hashimoto’s Dis­ease. One of the things it does to you is weaken your heart and one can suf­fer from heart fail­ure. I’m not say­ing that’s what I am head­ing for, but quite often it does feel that way to me.

I’m told that once I am on an effec­tive dose of med­ica­tion, I’ll feel like a brand new per­son. I’ve heard that a lot for the last six months. I’d be happy if I could just feel like the old per­son I used to be, before I was diag­nosed and on this stu­pid medication.

The exhaus­tion caught up to me this week and pre­vented me from get­ting to work. I’ve been liv­ing on adren­a­lin and my sup­ply must have finally depleted, I sort of col­lapsed the other night. I’m now signed off work for a week to rest.

I feel like this is my life now and I’ll never feel like my old self again. I know I’m an impa­tient patient, but I just can’t see a path back to good health. Let’s hope my doctor’s vision is clearer than my own.

Since receiv­ing my diag­no­sis of Hashmimoto’s Dis­ease and writ­ing about it here, the word “Hashimoto” is appear­ing with greater and greater fre­quency, in var­i­ous forms in the list of search terms plugged into Google that get you to my site.

Don’t worry, “northlon­don­hippy” remains the num­ber one search term that finds me. I’m a proper online destination.

But very high up on the list, sits Dr. Hashimoto. Con­sid­er­ing the first time I ever heard of it was as it passed over my doctor’s lips pre­ceded by the words “you have…”, I’m some­what sur­prised at how com­mon it is.

It seems quite a few of you out there in inter­net­land have Hashimoto’s Dis­ease too, or at least you think you do.

Peo­ple search for symp­toms, search for cures, search for clues on how to live with this auto-immune disease.

I’m far from an expert, hav­ing only known of my own con­di­tion for sev­eral months, but I have been dis­cov­er­ing loads of peo­ple I know who have thy­roid problems.

Every­one wants to know what “your dose” is.

“What’s your dose?”, they all say to me, look­ing vis­i­bly dis­ap­pointed when I tell them I am cur­rently on a pal­try 50 micro­grams of levothy­rox­ine, com­pared to their 150–200 micro­gram dose.

Its true my dose is cur­rently low, but that is about to change, again. My GP is mon­i­tor­ing my thy­roid lev­els at reg­u­lar inter­vals and increas­ing my dose grad­u­ally. The key, he says, is to find the low­est ther­a­peu­tic dose, because too much can cause dif­fer­ent prob­lems. I’m due for another blood test next week and I would expect my dose to go up again as soon as I receive the results.

With me, I didn’t know I had a prob­lem for quite a while, I ignored or dis­missed all the symp­toms I now know I had. It wasn’t until my back seized up and my legs gave out that it dawned on me I might have a health problem.

Clever, eh? I had heart pal­pi­ta­tions, breath­less­ness, nau­sea, dizzi­ness, no appetite, no energy, aching joints and a slow heart beat and I just thought it was just the nor­mal age­ing process catch­ing up to me.

My doc­tor assures me that all of this is very treat­able and once my dosage is cor­rect, I will feel like my old self again. I’ve felt crappy for so long, I’m not sure what that really means.

So if you’re already diag­nosed, just be patient. Give the med­ica­tion time to even you out, just like I am.

And if you think you have Hashimoto’s, just go see a doc­tor and you are a sim­ple blood test away from diag­no­sis and treatment.

And if it turns out you don’t have Hashimoto’s Dis­ease, per­haps this arti­cle in today’s New York Times, might give you pause for thought.

Yo.

I haven’t point­lessly ram­bled here in a while. It’s just an observation.

I woke up early this morn­ing, silly early, before 6:30am. Blame a blocked nose, a noisy cat and the threat of a cou­ple of deliv­er­ies for this early morn­ing appear­ance. I had an alarm set for 7:30am any­way, so its not a tragedy that I am up so early.

I’ve got a ship­ment of fresh cof­fee beans com­ing from my online roaster…yes, I am still madly into fresh cof­fee. I had to ease back from it a bit thanks to my thy­roid prob­lems, but I am feel­ing a lit­tle bet­ter, which means caf­feine and I are bud­dies again.

I couldn’t really han­dle cof­fee for a cou­ple of months, which was quite depress­ing for some­one who adores the stuff. For a while, I thought it was down to side effects from my thy­roid med­ica­tion, but my doc­tor told me it wasn’t, it was the actual dis­ease caus­ing the breath­less­ness and heart palpitations.

For about the last fort­night, I haven’t had those symp­toms because around a week prior to that, my doc­tor up the dosage on the thy­roid meds. I’m still not on a high dose and its likely to be increased again in Decem­ber, after my next blood test. I just think the new dose is hav­ing some sort of ther­a­peu­tic effect on me.

I’ve also seemed more ener­getic in the last week or so and I am feel­ing more myself than I have in a long time. That’s a good thing.

My back has been a lot bet­ter too. You might remem­ber that’s how all this health non­sense started, with a crip­pling back prob­lem. I never do any­thing that’s straight­for­ward, so nat­u­rally my thy­roid con­di­tion caused inflam­ma­tion in my back!

I was off from work for about 8 or 9 weeks in the end and my doc­tor offered (or rather sug­gested) that I take even more time off but my bank account couldn’t afford it. I went back for a cou­ple of nights a cou­ple of weeks ago and it was a seri­ous strug­gle, but I had another long planned gap of 2 weeks between shifts and my health improved some­what dur­ing that time.

While I was off, I had the joys of hav­ing builders in, refit­ting my ancient bath­room. I’d been try­ing to get this done for years, but find­ing some­one reli­able and trust­wor­thy was nearly impos­si­ble. In the end, I found a plumb­ing com­pany that was not ridicu­lously expen­sive and did the job fairly well, but it meant nearly two weeks of dis­rup­tion in my home.

The new bath­room is sim­ple and mod­ern, replac­ing a 30–40 year old bath­room that was nei­ther. I’m just happy to have it finished.

Return­ing to work this time was far less daunt­ing because I am gen­uinely start­ing to feel bet­ter. After being part time for Octo­ber, I’m back to work­ing full time in Novem­ber. Trust me, its a wel­come return and not just for the finan­cial reasons.

I like work­ing and I’ve missed it; I’ve missed my work mates too. That said, I am get­ting increas­ingly bored with being asked where I’ve been for the last cou­ple of months and hav­ing to explain all of my health woes. I thought about prepar­ing a writ­ten press state­ment, that I could hand out and refer to when repeat­edly ques­tioned, but peo­ple would think that was weird.

I’m sure some of the peo­ple ask­ing gen­uinely care how I am, but the major­ity are just ask­ing to be nosy. I also thought about mak­ing shit up and giv­ing every­one a dif­fer­ent answer on my where­abouts, like:

- I was on a secret mis­sion for the queen
– I was direct­ing my first fea­ture film
– I was on tour with my band
– I was in a drug induced coma
– I was hav­ing my shin­bones stretched (and it didn’t work!)
– I ran away and joined the cir­cus
– I was on an EU wide thrill-killing spree

And my per­sonal favourite:
– I don’t know where I’ve been, I have amnesia

The only place I ever want to talk about myself is right here on my web­site. In real life, I’d much rather be ignored and not have to explain myself to oth­ers. I’m actu­ally quite a pri­vate per­son, reclu­sive even, but when peo­ple pre­tend to be inter­ested in your life, you have to pre­tend you’re happy for their inter­est. Social niceties have to be respected, even when you know its all bullshit…especially when you know its all bullshit.

But not you, of course. You’re deeply inter­ested in every sin­gle aspect of my blessed exis­tence and you hang on my every word. Online, I’m used to the atten­tion and I crave it like a drug.

Ok, not really like a drug and believe me I know the difference.

It’s more like leav­ing the cur­tains open, while you change your cloth­ing in front of the win­dow. I’m giv­ing you the choice to peep at me, but its up to you if you choose to cast your glance in my direc­tion and if you do, you might see more than you expected.

My life is an open book here on the inter­net, avail­able for you to casu­ally thumb through the more inter­est­ing chap­ters, assum­ing one day I might write some. We can all wait for that day to come, but until then you’ll just have to put up with what­ever dri­vel I post.

Like this point­less entry about my rather point­less life.

It’s about bloody time!

The Global Cannabis Com­mis­sion report is being pre­sented at the House of Lords today. It was under­taken by the Beck­ley foun­da­tion, a UN-accredited non-governmental organ­i­sa­tion in advance of the United Nations strate­gic drug pol­icy review expected next year.

The report makes a rather sur­pris­ing recommendation…surprising because it is so sen­si­ble! They sug­gest that a “reg­u­lated mar­ket” should replace the cur­rent (silly and unen­force­able) inter­na­tional pro­hi­bi­tion of my favourite plant. The report pro­poses that we con­sider replac­ing pro­hi­bi­tion with a sys­tem of labelling, tax­a­tion and min­i­mal age requirements.

This is a seis­mic shift in atti­tude for the United Nations, which as an organ­i­sa­tion, sits at the cen­tre of cannabis pro­hi­bi­tion, but I can’t say for cer­tain that they will take this advice on board. After all, sim­i­lar rec­om­men­da­tions have been made here in the UK and have been promptly ignored by our igno­rant politi­cians. Espe­cially that incom­pe­tent ues­less twit, Gor­don Brown. I really thought he would be gone by now, but the Labour Party is seri­ously lack­ing com­mon sense and balls and they pussed out at their party con­fer­ence. Wimps!

This report puts the issue in con­text, going on to say “…in terms of rel­a­tive harms it (cannabis) is con­sid­er­ably less harm­ful than alco­hol or tobacco. His­tor­i­cally, there have only been two deaths world­wide attrib­uted to cannabis, whereas alco­hol and tobacco together are respon­si­ble for an esti­mated 150,000 deaths per annum in the UK alone.”

I’d like to know how 2 peo­ple died from weed. Did they choke on on it? Oh and the word “his­tor­i­cally” in that con­text means since records began, which is a seri­ously long-old time!

Nat­u­rally this report is being warmly wel­comed by cannabis cam­paign­ers world-wide, myself included.

My dope smok­ing recently hasn’t been recre­ational, as much as it has been med­i­c­i­nal, thanks to my recent health prob­lems. Spliff helped when my back was seized up like a clenched fist and it con­tin­ues to calm the nau­sea I am feel­ing from my chronic thy­roidi­tis, which is another name for Hashimoto’s disease.

I don’t know what I would do with­out weed and I know that is the same for lit­er­ally mil­lions of peo­ple around the world, who are unnec­es­sar­ily crim­i­nalised for our love of dope. I am not a crim­i­nal and nei­ther are they! It’s about time the law caught up to this unde­ni­able truth.

If you would like to read the Guardian’s take on this new report, all you need to do is CLICK HERE.

And if you would like to find out more about weed, please fol­low this link to the hippy’s cannabis truth series.

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!