Thursday, 18 February 2010

MY GRAVES DISEASE HELL!!

Its late nearly 1am and im sat here about to write about this awful graves disease i have even though i am so tired but when i get to bed i cant sleep properly so its a waste of time!!
I was diagnosed with graves which is a thyroid disease around 7 years ago.
Basically i knew something was wrong because i felt so ill, i had trouble staying awake and remember one day thinking that i could have fallen asleep on the pavement!!
I have had 2 courses of block and replace therapy which is a very high dose of carbimazole for several weeks to block the thyroid function completely which makes you feel desperately ill, then they give you levothyroxine to bring your levels back up, this part took months to get right, i started on 25mgs a day along with 40mg carbimazole and had bloods taken every 6 weeks, every blood test showed my levels were still too low so gradually the thyroxine was increased til eventually i was on 125mg a day.
At last i started to feel normal again and apart from my hair thinning slightly all the horrible graves symptoms had gone, no more palpitations, racing heart, hot sweats and feeling so tired.
But all good things unfortunately have to end and after 18 months they stop all the meds in the hope that the graves has gone, my consultant told me that 8 out of 10 people are cured and are still graves free in 10 years that was in september last year.
I have kept quite well, i moved back home which lifted my mood and was feeling pretty good until about a week or so ago and i now feel dizzy a lot, extremely tired but wake frequently in the night, heartb racing again so i had bloods taken last friday and i had the dreaded phonecall today from docs asking me to go in as blood test has come bacvk showing its returned again, thats 5 months!!
This is the 2nd time i have been through this and not sure i want to go through that hell again so will be discussing on monday what to do.
The other options i wont even consider, they are having the thyroid removed definately a no no and radioactive iodine this would mean i couldnt go near my kids for a week that is unthinkable!!
Will update after ive seen the doc and will talk to her about ldn also.
xx

No comments:

Post a Comment