I have bingo

[kiya]

Using this page as a reference, hypothyroidism section:

Stuff I have known was part of hypothyroid conditions for some time that I have:
Fatigue
Brain fog
Low basal temperature
Cold hands/feet
Tendency to feel cold
Constipation
Goiter/swollen thyroid gland
Brittle hair/nails
Depression

Stuff I'm not surprised by but which I hadn't been thinking about specifically as related:
Poor memory and concentration
Severe PMS symptoms
Long, heavy, brutal menstrual cycles
Dry skin
Allergies (immune disorders are more likely related than not)
(Putting 'migraine' here though I actually think that's not related since my triggers don't appear to be hormonal and I haven't been dealing with them often of late even though the immune condition is clearly worsening)

Stuff that I was kind of freaked out about that cleared up when I got on thyroid meds and thus appears related:
Lump in throat
Palpitations and other cardiac irregularities
(Fortunately these have not recurred because they terrified me in ways that I was completely incompetent to tell anyone about.)

Stuff I have learned is almost certainly linked to my version of the condition because it's coming back all at once after my nonconsensual medication change:
Muscle weakness and completely fucked endurance
Pain and stiffness in muscles or joints ESPECIALLY MY DAMN KNEES
Shortness of breath on exertion (not to mention the 'now I will sit down for an hour to recover' bit)
BACK PAIN
Breast tenderness
"Digestive disturbances", what a lovely euphemism
Stiff neck and shoulders (also stress-linked, so I will never be free of this one)
Irritability, though frankly with all this crap coming up again who wouldn't be cranky?

I think I will not have to Google "Hashimoto's [symptom]" now to see if it goes on this list. I think that is everything.

... I feel the need to set my mood to 'irritated', because irritated.

Fucking bingo.

Comments

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Does it help to know, at least?

[kiya]

That's actually really complicated.

For a very long time I've described my health as 'a long list of annoying but not really treatable subclinical issues'. Having essentially all of that list reduced to 'I have an autoimmune disease' provides me an avenue for relief.

And it makes me ragingly angry that it didn't get any treatment before a year ago. That all of this pointless misery was really, genuinely, entirely pointless. I just want to thump people with the cane that I now don't really need when I have functional treatment going, particularly the doctor who I asked to check my thyroid levels every damn year and who blew me off because the numbers weren't good enough to qualify for fucked up.

Right now I'm having a hard time with a sense of hopelessness, though. I'm drowning, drowning in See Above List, which, being a fatigue-and-depression condition, starts sharply limiting my resources for coping with it right when it starts piling on the crap. The medication that actually treats my condition is unavailable for gods-know-how-long, the generic version thereof leaves me like this. I haven't got a doctor's appointment yet, they haven't called me back, and it's the weekend so I won't hear from them until Monday. This is enough no-longer-normal to be an active misery process and normal enough that all the helplessness comes rushing back.

I just have to hold out until I can get another doctor's appointment and get medication that might work....

(I should probably post the saga of my medication to LJ, I don't actually think I have.)

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

I just looked up the history of the thing in Wikipedia. So this is a disease that has been known for over a hundred years, and for which effective treatments have existed for decades? Yeah, that's infuriating.

I mean, I've got a crippling disease that has only been really, truly isolated from similar diseases a few years ago, and for which an effective treatment was only developed slightly before then. And I got that treatment basically within a year of when it was approved. So I can't feel angry about my treatment since I've gotten the best treatment humanity could provide. I can feel angry at the CONDITION, but not at the TREATMENT.

You, on the other hand -- yeah. Your entire LIFE could have been different had a doctor taken you seriously. That's ... there's no way to not be enraged by that.

[kiya]

The funny thing is, okay: I was treated for hypothyroidism as a teenager. Which is why I asked the doctor, every year, to check on my blood chemistry.

When I changed doctors - which was a process of climbing out of the helpless-depressive and change-aversive tendencies I have - and said I wanted it checked? The new one immediately checked my antibodies. (He also prefers to treat not only to actual evidence of which numbers people - especially women - with this condition tend to want to function best, since the lab numbers are basically set such that a certain baseline of misery is considered normal, but also the "treat the patient, not the numbers" stuff.)

But yeah. I keep seesawing through the whole "WHAT THE HELL, UNIVERSE" around what and who might I be if I hadn't been fucking crippled with a condition that basically is custom built in this culture to instill "You're a lazy, entitled, whiny ass with no real problems" as a hardcore assumption in the sufferer.

(On the subject of 'effective treatments have existed for decades', my grandmother was probably treated for this. It's inherited. And she was on thyroid medications.)

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

A disease which has been known, has effective treatments, and has a fucking laboratory blood test for diagnosis. For which you had a family history, a personal history, and the symptoms. This really seems like, well, not the LEGAL definition of malpractice, but certainly not GOOD medical practice.

[kiya]

Symptom of hypothyroidism: irritability.

For some damn reason.

(Gonna write up the medication recall story in a new post, since I haven't for LJ.)

[annwyd.livejournal.com]

I'm a bit surprised you didn't know about the joint issues that come up with hypothyroidism--they're one of my most obvious symptoms, and one of the first ones I realized was thyroid-related.

When I first noticed joint pain some years back, I chalked it up to "getting older," because I was so used to hearing there was nothing physically wrong with me.

In my early twenties.

[kiya]

I chalked up the whole aches and pains thing to "cost of doing business in a physical body" as well; it was intermittent enough that I didn't know how to track it meaningfully, even though sometimes I really wanted a cane to walk.

I didn't have "I have symptoms of this" as part of my deal with it, actually, so much as "someone tracked this when I was younger, please keep tracking it just in case, it may be related to my depression".

[hairmonger.livejournal.com]

I can't thank you enough for the list. It's been literally decades since I looked over a hypothyroid symptom list, and I didn't have any joint pain then. I was diagnosed when I was fourteen, and when I started having joint pain in my fifties--I'm sixty now--well, everybody in my family has arthritis, and almost all of them in their hands. Now to hit the internet, and then browbeat my doctor into doing a T3 and T4 instead of only a TSH for my annual this summer!

Mary Anne in Kentucky

[kiya]

The link at the top of this entry goes to a page that includes a bunch of the symptoms that I don't have, too... :} (It does not include 'bizarre acne', which I'm pretty sure is related too on the same principle.)