So here's the deal. I was told by my rheumatologist on Friday that if I didn't shape up, I was headed toward fibromyalgia or rheumatoid arthritis. He was nicer about it, of course, but I got the message. To that end, I'm trying to find ways to force myself to eat better and exercise more. Blogging is a way to hold myself accountable, so here I am. It's almost midnight on a Sunday night and I accidentally drank 3 glasses of tea this evening which means I've got a while before I can get to sleep. What better time to begin!
My name is Tammy. I'm 32 and I have bad genes. Cancer and autoimmune disease plague my mom's side of the family. Cancer happens now and then in dad's side, but they are generally healthy. But like I always say, I got my mom's insides and my dad's outsides. Worst of both worlds. And yes, that is in jest.
I have the medicine cabinet of an 80 year old. Meds for depression, acid reflux, PCOS, Hashimoto's Thyroiditis, and autoimmune comprise the prescription portion and I fill the rest of the pill caddy with several vitamins. I started my first daily medication at age 16 when my thyroid went all weird for a year or so before leveling back out again. But by that time, I hadn't yet begun to cycle, if you catch my drift. The doc tried a horrible "jump start" medication twice before giving up and putting me on birth control to make my hormones behave. It sort of worked...eventually. (I have to say, if you know anyone who is having trouble tolerating the pill, tell them to not give up. There are a million of kinds and you will eventually find the one that works for your body. And if it isn't working, don't wait the three months that the docs say to. Your body will tell you and there's no need to prolong the torture.)
Fast forward to college when I discovered that 24/7 heartburn was an "acid problem" (who knew?) so there's another pill. But when I suddenly realized I couldn't feel my stomach for the first time in my life- that is one of those moments you never forget. So life goes on, graduate, get married, go to work...general life crises...realizing that living with depression is worse than the stigma of getting meds... Realizing that antidepressants are God's gift to humanity.... Yeah, it's one thing to realize most people don't have a perpetually upset stomach, and another to realize that people aren't lying when they say they're "good" or "fine". Happy can be a default state of being! Crazy, right? Yet another genetic gift from Mom's side. But that's ok, I've learned that the depressive part of me is also the creative and smart part of me. And now I can tap that without having to go though despair and hopelessness. Better living through chemistry. Yay!
About 2006 I contracted Mono (thanks Kendra) and never fully recovered, as sometimes happens. A couple of years later the doc referred me to a rheumatologist. He told me that my immune system was showing signs of autoimmune trouble but I hadn't actually presented with a specific disease, so I just had to wait. The next summer, my thyroid started acting up again. This time, it was Hashimoto's. My immune system thinks that my thyroid is a foreign body so it devotes much time and energy to attacking it. My thyroid, in turn, is able to function less and less as time goes by, so I have to take two separate thyroid meds to replace the vital hormones it produces. These meds make me overheat easily.
So many people, upon hearing this, wonder why you don't just remove the thyroid? I wondered the same thing. But the disease lies with the immune system. If you remove the thyroid, the immune system will just find something else to attack, and that something else might not be so easy to treat. So we just leave it alone, and replace the needed hormones and hope my immune system doesn't go even more crazy...
Then people wonder why I'm more tired than others, or why I can't do as much. So I tell it this way. Think of when you are fighting off an infection of some kind. You know the feeling- you can tell that you aren't 100% but you haven't actually come down with anything. A wise person drinks some extra water, takes some extra vitamin C and gets a little extra rest to help things along. But then sometimes you actually get sick. Your body is fighting the illness and you are experiencing all the symptoms and you feel rotten. So on a good day, my immune system is fighting my thyroid like it's an infection. On a good day I need a little more water, vitamin C, and rest. I need to pace myself to stay healthy. If I don't do such a good job of that, then I feel as though I've become actually sick. I'm exhausted, my brain won't brain, my muscles won't muscle. It sucks, and it takes a long time to feel better, sometimes weeks.
So you can imagine how this may start a spiral of not doing much in the fear of overdoing it. You don't do much, so you feel tired, so you don't do much. It sucks. And this blog is one of my attempts to break that spiral and prevent the complications that come from it.
