Medications and misery

I wish I had a better excuse for being absent so long than "I've been beyond exhausted", and "my nerves have gotten too bad to hold my phone very long", but there they are. 

I feel like I should be documenting my journey of the last two months with new medications though. For those who have chronic illnesses, any chronic illness, medication becomes a part of your daily existence. Thyroid medication, insulin, blood pressure medications, antidepressants, etc. It doesn't have to be some big fancy rare disease. I believe the vast majority of older humans need something daily to keep them as healthy as they can be, so this is not unique to people with these debilitating chronic illnesses. Most people can relate. 

The thing that needs to be talked about more, by Drs and patients, in my opinion is how damaging and miserable medication changes and "trial and error" can be for weeks on end. Sometimes it's worse than the disease itself and you find yourself wondering why on earth you are doing this to yourself. 

For example, albeit a drastic one, in my 20s I had thyroid cancer. My thyroid was completely removed during two surgeries and I went through radiation off and on for almost 3 years. For those unaware your thyroid produces a hormone that regulates your metabolism, the energy with which your body functions. Each time I went through radiation I had to have close to zero thyroid hormone in my body. At that time 20ish years ago they did this by stopping your thyroid supplement pill, since I had no thyroid that means my body had none of this metabolism hormone. I would sleep 20 hrs a day, my hair would be brittle, my skin turned hard and bumpy, any food made me nauseous (and you must be on an extremely strict no iodine diet also), I was freezing all the time and I gained weight each time. 

Now what you may not know is that thyroid hormone takes minimum 6-8 weeks to adjust. Down or up, a little or a lot, you're looking at 6-8 wks minimum. Most people who have thyroid issues have experienced low thyroid numbers or high thyroid numbers. The thyroid test TSH is an inverse test- the more you have the less actual thyroid hormone in your blood. For most a low number would be a TSH of over 5, and a high thyroid hormone number would be less than 0.5 depending on the lab. They would get my TSH to around 40-50. They no longer do it this way by the way. Nowadays I get a handy dandy little shot that artificially raises my TSH to about 100, they take my blood to monitor the cancer markers to make sure it hasn't come back and then my TSH goes back to normal the next day. Isn't science amazing?! 

Anyway, so to get it out of my system completely you're looking at 3 or 4 months coming off of the hormone, the final 5 weeks being the absolute worst, then 3 days in hospital getting my radiation, and then usually "only" 2-3 months building back up to a normal level. These numbers move so slowly toward the end and have to be at a certain point so I would have to go in weekly then almost daily to see where they were, so they could say "ok this is low enough to give you the radiation let's go" ! I became quite close to my oncologist endocrinologist and his staff. 

So 3-4 months up, 1.5-2 months down, wait 6 months and start again. You can imagine the disruption to my life- I had to take time off university, leave my job, stay with my grandmother during the worst of it so she could take care of me…. BUT it wasn't the radiation that caused the disruption and physical misery. It was simply the medication. The medication that is extremely common in our population. My mom takes it, my dad takes it, my mother in law, my parents dog takes it for goodness sake. 

My point is that medication adjustments can be extremely difficult and sometimes worse than the treatment or disease themselves. 

So now in my next few posts I will take you through the latest adjustments and changes and what they have been like.