#i have a doctor appt booked but the only time i can see *my* doc is the 5th of jan and that feels too far away :(

[lavellane]

lord the women you put on this earth to bare children are googling their irregular period symptoms and having panic attacks at 4am

[manawhaat]

Personal lady talk below. Don't read if you're offended by *gasp* vaginas.

Hi yeah so I've recently started seeing my doctors just to have check ups and such since I haven't really been seen in like 6 years (and I had a vision thing happen a couple months ago that led to an ER visit) but this brings me to my gyno....

My last pap was in 2013 and only bc they MADE me do one to prescribe me antibiotics for a uti. Cut to February of this year. I make an appt. That morning my alarm goes off and I legit cackle maniacally. I'd only got an hour and a half of sleep, so I turned my alarm off and rescheduled for an afternoon appointment later that week.

Two days before the new appointment, I get my period. I reschedule because they say I can't be seen while bleeding.

The night before my new new appointment, I get my period AGAIN. I go anyway because it's now over a month since my first attempt at being seen. I change it to a birth control consult and am seen. We discuss options and schedule another appointment for my exams.

Today I'm late to my appointment trying to squeeze my not compact car into compact only spaces in the parking garage. They say I am considered a no call no show and have to reschedule for another day, but then tell me to wait and see if the doc has time to squeeze me in. She does and I sit here, naked aside from the crinkly paper vest and sheet for my bottom half.

45 minutes go by and the nurse comes back in. Doc has been called out for a delivery 🙄 A male doc can do the exam but I nope out on that and agree to come back in a couple of hours.

15 minutes in the waiting room they call me up to get in the books and the nurse comes and grabs me and is like 'jk she can see you in a few minutes so you don't have to come back.'

So now I'm sitting here waiting for the nurse to tell me to get naked so I can have my exams done almost 2 hours after I got here.

Part of me is like 'no wonder why I never went in. doctors take fucking forever' but the other part of me is quietly wondering 'am I not supposed to be seen by this lady? Is the universe telling me this isn't the right doctor for me and that I shouldn't do this? that I should go with the other doctor I'd originally wanted to see before I settled on this one bc she's closer to home... I mean she seemed fine when we did our birth control consult, I didn't get irked or anything, but like, I'm just suspicious now as to why it's been such a journey to get here...

So yeah. Wish me luck, thanks for listening, and sorry for the long post.

[dbluegreen]

long day,at least for me

dang. i think another piece of one of my teeth has chipped,and today i was just working towards the eyes issue...

anyway,had eye appt. at 6:30 tonight so i had to stay awake for that. went a little early to pick out frames. in their budget section,most of the wire rimmed frames were RECTANGULAR. oh no,not what i want. there were only three ovalish to pick from. i found a pair of frames that were just like the ones i have now,but they were 180 bucks. crazy! the budget kind or 113 bucks for the frame. i went through old frames i had to see if i could re-use something,but as a person who wears their glasses all during their waking time,my glasses get a lot of wear and tear,so i decide to get new budget ones.

doc also says because i’m so nearsighted and my lenses are so thick,he recommends i get very small frames so they won’t be too weighty. thank god they have the poly lenses now...glass ones would be really really heavy! that’s actually fine with me.

so i had a thorough eye exam,and no cataracts and no glaucoma. i still have to go back for the dilated pupil test to make sure i don’t have detachment or anything else like that,but i’m glad the rest is okay aside from the blind as a batness. i don’t have dry eye either,so yay. i love my eye doctor. he’s in his sixties or seventies,and you can tell he still loves his job! he has such a good way of making one feel comfortable too.

after eye appt,i picked up books for sara and i that were on hold at the library as well as getting a couple of other things from the new book shelves,and went to the grocery store. 

i will probably crash tomorrow big time but i may need to go back to the eye office if they are not able to get the glasses i wanted in the right size for my temples. then i’ll have to pick some rectangles. also,i may not have energy to go tomorrow,so may have to do that next week.

then i need to work on getting my license renewed,and try to find a doc to treat my hashimoto’s...that could be quite a task...followed by starting the process of getting my teeth out,whether it is one at a time or a bunch at once. i am hoping the low income clinic can help me,though i have to travel to go there,and that is a problem with my spoon supply. this is aside from anything else that life throws at me,as well as working around my sister’s various appointments. oh,and i really need to apply for food stamps too. sis may lose her food stamps because she can’t work the requirement and the doctor thinks she can work.

she wants to try volunteering a few hours a week at an animal shelter to see how much she can tolerate,but she really needs to test that out gradually and the work requirement is twenty hours a week,which is way too much for her to even try to start with.

fun times!

[psi-psina]

Hi. :) You don't know be but I've been following you for a little while now and since I saw your posts talking about Graves Disease I wanted to ask you about it. I'm a 19 yr old girl, and I was diagnosed with it a few months ago and started on PTU. I wanted to ask, what was your experience with doctors and medication like? You had to have your thyroid removed? I feel worried about how this is supposed to be managed long-term because my doctors can be quite dismissive. If you don't mind. :)

OH MY GOD

DEAR ANON PLEASE HEED THE FOLLOWING LEARN FROM MY MISTAKES

So this is my experience and for the LOVE OF GOD don’t let this happen to you.

I was diagnosed with graves disease at the age of 14, showing symptoms of fatigue, tremors in my hands, exophthalmos and a slight goitre. I was tested for sleep apnea before i was diagnosed. Once diagnosed, my mother took me to a naturopath rather than an endocrinologist (i was a child, i had no control over the situation PLEASE DON’T DO ANYTHING THIS STUPID) 😩. It didn’t go well. I was given a tincture of iodine and various herbs (including licorice :/), which i had to take for about 3 months. it did nothing for me and my symptoms steadily got worse until my mother had to take me back to the doctor. My blood work showed a significant worsening of my condition; my T3 & T4 were both far higher than they had been before.

I was put on Neo-Mercazole which I remained on periodically over the next 9 years. You cannot remain on thyroid suppressants indefinitely due to their nature and bastard side effects (expelling giant blood clots through your nose? horrific), which got gradually worse the longer I had to take them. I don’t know how your doctors are managing your PTU but be vigilant. You NEED to aim at getting in remission. I was monitored closely while taking NM over that first course, and then as my hormone levels returned to normal I was weened off it. I was okay for 2 years, and then relapsed when I was 17. I was put back on NM and monitored until my levels returned to “normal”, then I relapsed again when I was 20.

after this I remained on NM pretty much for the following 3 years, but it’s effectiveness started to wane and many of the diffuse symptoms (especially anxiety, palpitations, insomnia, tremors, goitre, exophthalmos etc) simply weren’t going away even when my blood work showed I was within a supposedly normal hormonal range, and I just slowly went downhill over those 3 years.

this is huge problem with regulating thyroid disorders like this, your hormones are measured only in your blood work but T3 and T4 are heavily protein-bound hormones, meaning it’s presence in your blood IS NOT always consistent with it’s presence in your other tissues, where it is able to accumulate (not indefinitely without detection, but enough to give you symptoms). Suppressants just didn’t work for me long-term. They couldn’t help my thyroid regulate my metabolism over an extended period of time, the thyroxine in my body just kept accumulating. Basically, the moment I relapsed when I was 17, I was fucked. I was not aware of this at the time, obviously. At the time I had absolutely no idea what was going on.

the events at the end of my Final Relapse that led up to my surgery were serendipitous and bizarre. I was travelling to Japan in the October (2013) for a few weeks (which i flat out should not have been doing lmao) and got an appointment with my doc because i needed to fill another script for NM before I left, because i was about to run out. So i went and got the script and then when I went to fill it at the pharmacy, I couldn’t get the NM. There was an international shortage of Neo-Mercazole and I was flying out of the country the literal next day and I couldn’t get any ANYWHERE. PTU was still available but I couldn’t get that with a script for NM either. So I had no medication for most of those three weeks.

When I got home I booked another appointment as soon as I could get one and went back to work. Got another blood test to see what was going on and finally got some PTU. A couple of days later I came down with a cold. My immune system was shot and I was struggling to do things like get out of bed and walk up stairs at this point so I called in sick to work on the monday because felt so ill, and made another doc appt for that afternoon because i needed a medical certificate.

I went in to the doctor expecting to walk out with a med certificate, and asked her about my bloodwork. She opened the bloodwork and looked at it, looked at me, then took my temperature and pulse and immediately called my endocrinologist. My T3 and T4 levels were so high they were not measurable, i was feverish and hazy and my resting heart rate was 160-170 bpm. She told me I needed to go straight to emergency because I was at risk of thyroid storm (at which point I just burst into tears lol) and she called ahead to the hospital to have me admitted immediately, and that was that. I was taken to the hospital and was monitored there for 4 days and given several medications to try to flush some of the excess thyroxine from my body to make it safe enough for them to cut my thyroid out, which happened four weeks later.

So aside from the more diffuse symptoms of anxiety, depression, insomnia, full body tremors, exhaustion, goitre and exophthalmos, I was admitted in emergency with acute symptoms like fever, tachycardia, chest pain, hypertension, muscle weakness, bloody diarrhea, peripheral edema and fuck knows what else. :/ None of these things really abated over the weeks leading up to the surgery, and I honestly can’t describe what it was like to wake up from it almost asymptomatic after dealing with these things for months and years. It was like waking up in a completely different body.

If you’re wondering how I could have let things get that bad, how i didn’t realise just how serious it was, you need to understand. You need to understand how gradually all of this happens, it built up over a period of years, and when you live with a chronic illness for that long you literally just get used to feeling like shit, so if something else shitty starts happening you’re already so tired it hardly even registers. It doesn’t strike you as particularly abnormal because it all becomes normal. That’s the most dangerous thing about it. Not to mention, the sicker you get with Graves, the less capable you are of assessing your own situation; the anxiety and exhaustion and insomnia and horrible hazy brain fog you’re in every single day make it completely impossible to think clearly.

SO THE MORAL OF THIS IS, for the love of God, be careful, and take it seriously. It is extremely serious. I did not take it seriously enough for years because I was young, active and otherwise healthy which gave me a threshold for tolerating it that was far too high. Don’t dismiss your symptoms, don’t let your doctors dismiss your symptoms, ESPECIALLY the mental symptoms. Be aware of all possible and potential symptoms so you can actually recognise them for what they are, along with all the potential side effects of PTU. 

Get blood work done EVERY THREE MONTHS. THREE MONTHS, not six, not twelve, every three months. Other thyroid disorders, you might be able to be a bit more chill about, graves you fucking cannot. You cannot.

Read and get as much information about this as you can. Heed how your diet is going to effect this, because like any endocrine disorder, it will.

Elaine Moore is useful. (Read the forums) This is useful. Reading patient forums about people’s experience with it and how they manage it is invaluable, it’s far better than reading blogs that are usually dogmatic and trying to sell you stuff. patient.info is also a good resource for information.

Make sure you have a good GP and ESPECIALLY a good endocrinologist who works WITH you. Most endo’s DO NOT specialise in thyroid disorders, most of them specialise in diabetes and only have a middling knowledge of thyroid issues. It’s absolutely crucial to find an endo who specialises in thyroid disorders. Find one, if you can. Otherwise just crowd source the information yourself, print it and take it to your doctors yourself. Because honestly, the cost of not doing that is just....not worth it.

This isn’t supposed to scare you or anything, it’s a god damn burden but there are plenty of people with Graves who achieve remission or find ways to manage it over long periods of time, it’s a highly individual disease. So I really hope you are able to do that. :) TAKE CARE OF YOURSELF. 

[canaryatlaw]

It’s late, and I want to go to bed, and today wasn’t bad but I had a chest pain episode on my way home and I’ve just generally felt like shit since then. So let’s get this written and then I’ll go to bed. I woke up at 1:25 (alarm) and got ready, then ubered to the cardiology appointment. Unsurprisingly, I was the youngest person in the cardiovascular suite by a few decades at least. But they got me in pretty quickly since I’d just seen the gastro doc there so they had all my info already. Doctor asked a bunch of questions, did some listening, and then said he thinks if it was my heart giving me pain I would likely have secondary symptoms like lightheaded-ness that I don’t have, so he doesn’t think it’s my heart, but he’s gonna send me for an echocardiogram to make sure. So they scheduled that for me (couldn’t get me in until the beginning of November) and then I booked it back up to PT because I had to make the appt right before the one I already had for PT. My uber like, disappeared on me, so I got mad and just jumped into one of the cabs that was conveniently in front of me (and then bitched to the driver about uber, much to his amusement). So I had a shorter PT session, just did some exercises, but it was good. Came home, for ready and did make up, then set off for our first small group meeting. Unfortunately, the bus I was waiting for was running later than the app I have said it was, and it was raining, a lot, so by the time the bus came my Wonder Woman hoodie was pretty much soaked through (and was still soaked through when I came home 3 hours later). So I was running late, which always pisses me off. I made it to downtown and was supposed to get on the pink line, but then they said the next train wasn’t coming for 17 minutes and it was already the meeting time at that point so I was like fuck that and jumped in yet another uber. Made it to the restaurant we were meeting at and found the group relatively easily. It’s being called the “international” life group, but it’s for anyone who isn’t originally from Chicago, lol. The main reason I ended up in it is it’s the only Friday group and I have class Monday-Thursday night, but I also liked what they said about building community and friendships when you don’t have people from home around you. So we mostly just hung out and talked, the food was great, and I ended up sitting between two fairly cute guys (I’m always evaluating my options around Christian guys, I can’t help it) so that was cool. Going home was somewhat easier than getting there, but on the last leg of the trip I started having a chest pain episode that was really bad and probably lasted a solid 15 minutes. It was still going by time I got home and I just ended up lying on my bed writhing in pain and saying “ow” over and over again. Like, I’m glad there’s not a major issue with my heart, but I’d like some freaking answers please, because I can’t keep just dealing with this when it’s fucking awful. I am still gonna follow up with a primary care doctor so hopefully they can do something. I think I have found a common factor of having eaten food shortly beforehand, but it still doesn’t seem like acid reflux and sometimes the food is very non-acid triggers (like yogurt) and that doesn’t seem to matter, so whatever that means. Eventually it did start to go away, and when it was gone I called my parents and told them, they didn’t really know what to do but we talked and through some ideas around. I felt pretty shitty from that point on, but I watched the Inhumans episode from tonight, then this week’s Brooklyn 99, then randomly watched last weekend’s Saturday night live because I wanted to see what else they did. And yeah, that’s about it. It’s late and I’m tired, so I’m gonna pass out now. Goodnight babes. Hope you had an awesome Friday.