Overactive Thyroid – My 20 Month Recovery
My recovery from an overactive thyroid gland is complete. Fingers crossed.
It’s now getting on for two years since I rapidly sunk into the darkness of ill – health. Again. Over the course of a couple of months it felt as if I was losing everything that was so precious to me. My strength, my endurance, the muscles I’d cultivated through weight training. My heart raced and I lost weight even though I was eating as if it was Christmas Day.
I started to fade. I was becoming the epitome of the invisible, older woman. Even staying upright was a little challenging. My health fears skyrocketed whilst my self-esteem plummeted.
I was convinced it was a reoccurrence of my heart condition. If it was I was deteriorating at a much faster rate than before. I feared further surgery but in the in the midst of a huge covid backlog the alternative didn’t bear thinking about.
So I was ecstatic when I got the diagnosis that I had an overactive thyroid gland. It may seem a little odd that I welcomed having another serious health condition but I knew it was treatable with medication.
Within days, although it felt much longer, I commence on Carbimazole. A few weeks later I had my first consultation with a endocrinologist followed by an ultrasound scan to confirm his diagnosis.
I had Graves Disease, the most common cause of an overactive thyroid.
What had caused it? I wasn’t surprised to be told that having one autoimmune condition, in my case, psoriatic arthritis, makes it more likely that another one will come along. I’m hoping that I can avoid the hat trick.
I was told that I’d be on medication for 18 – 24 months when I’d be taken off it to see what happens. If it became overactive again a more permanent solution would be sought, usually radioactive iodine. I started to form the view from talking to people that had been treated for an overactive thyroid that this course of action was inevitable but I now know that I’ve a 50% chance that I’ve already made a full recovery.
My recovery has been the stuff of textbooks. I was initially commenced on a daily dose of 20mg of Carbimazole. I responded well. It can take 1-2 months to feel the benefits of the medication but within a couple of weeks I started to feel better. Although a dose of norovirus over the Christmas holidays reminded me that my body had taken a battering.
I focused on recovering my strength and endurance putting in place 3 goals for my 63rd birthday which was 3 months away:
◦ Returning to the 100kg deadlift club
◦ 63 birthday burpees
◦ Completing a 10K event in Regents Park.
Over the course of 16 months medication has been slowly reduced. My thyroid hormones have remained stable throughout. So it has now been stopped. I’ll see the endocrinologist at the end of the year when I’ll be discharged if there is no reoccurrence.
What I want to ensure is that if it does start to become overactive again I can identify the signs immediately.
Last time it felt as if my deterioration happened with immediate effect. But were there earlier signs that I chose to ignore or just missed? Did my resting heart rate increase and/or my VO2 max drop? One of the benefits of having an iWatch is that I can look back at the data it has collected over the years. I can see that everything was normal until my symptoms hit me with a vengeance. From that I have to conclude it will be all or nothing.
Is there anything I can do to increase my chances that it won’t reoccur? As you can imagine I’ve done a lot of reading on the subject. I’ve concluded that if it is going to return it will. There are, of course, some commentators that advocate restrictive diets, supplements etc. but I’m taking a pragmatic approach. I’ll keep myself as healthy as possible whilst keeping my arthritic fingers crossed that the endocrinology clinic will no longer feature in my diary.
If you are interested in my experience of having an overactive thyroid:
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