Re: I could use some prayers
Posted: Fri Oct 12, 2012 12:42 am
Consider yourself prayed on once more.
Lord, please don't ever change our RPB! He's perfectly funny—not too little, and not too much.RPB wrote:But ... my dad's hair turned grey .... mine turned loose. ...
RPB, I've been reading your concerns about the possibility of becoming dependent on thyroid medication. I have been entirely dependent on it myself since April of 2000. I had a pretty bad bout of Graves Disease in 1999 causing a wildly overactive thyroid, and it ended with my having to swallow that radioactive iodine treatment to ablate my thyroid gland. On the Mercury/Gemini/Apollo crew capsules, the shield that prevented the spacecraft from burning up on reentry was called the "ablation shield," which ought to give you a hint about what the radiation does to your thyroid gland.......it burns it away. So although I did not have the surgery to remove my thyroid, the treatment effectively did the same thing, and I have been told today all I have is today is some scar tissue that once was a gland.
Now, when it first became apparent that I had a wildly overactive thyroid, it was due to a host of symptoms, the most obvious of which were A) I lost 80 lb in a tick over 2 months; B) I began to experience hormonal changes which included, of all things, sore breasts and wanting to cry all the time (it was disconcerting to say the least); and C) I began to develop sores on my lower legs, and D) I began to experience some cardiac arrhythmias. A simple blood test showed my thyroid levels to be way out of whack, and so the next step was to figure out if the hyperthyroidism was caused by cancer or Graves Disease—the two most likely diagnoses.
So the definitive test was to undergo a PET scan, for which, if I recall correctly, I also had to swallow an iodine isotope, but one that would mark the gland on a scan rather than ablate it. The way the isotope would show in the gland would determine if it was cancer or Graves. If it was collecting in nodes on the scan, that would indicate tumorous tissue and a diagnosis of cancer. If the isotopes were diffusely spread throughout the gland, that would indicate Graves Disease, and that was my diagnosis.
My thyroid was ablated in December of 1999, and then I had to wait until April for my thyroid levels—which had been dangerously high—to bottom out before my doctor could determine a baseline from which to begin prescribing thyroid replacement medication. During that time, I also went through a lot of changing symptoms, including a massive weight gain. Once I got on the medication, I started getting back to feeling normal.
Living with having to take a daily thyroid pill just isn't that bad, and it isn't that expensive either. When I bought my meds from Walmart, I paid $4/month for my thyroid medication. I have since switched to a locally owned compounding pharmacy because I got fed up with Walmart's inability to maintain a reliable inventory on my BP meds, and so now I pay about $5-$6/month. I spend more than that at my neighborhood coffee shop each week, so it isn't like it's a huge chunk out of my budget. I have other concerns about it......like what happens when the supply runs out after the zombie apocalypse......but that's another story.
It goes without saying that Graves would be the preferred diagnosis, but the key thing to remember here if this is the boat you're in is that BOTH diseases are eminently treatable, and the survival rates for thyroid cancer patients are quite high. Nobody wants any kind of cancer, but if you had to pick one, thyroid cancer would be one of the "better" choices. And post diagnosis/treatment, living with a daily supplement is neither difficult nor expensive.
RPB, I'm sharing this with you so that you can gain some perspective on your predicament. I wish someone had told me what was happening to me before my doctor finally got around to admitting that maybe I wasn't just being a whiner, and something was actually wrong and needed to be addressed (I have since "fired" him for incompetence with managing my back issues). I was scared to death. I had lost my dad to cancer just 9 years before this, and I knew that with the bizarre hormonal changes, some kind of cancer was a distinct possibility. It is hard to believe from where I sit today, a relatively healthy guy all things considered, that I was that sick at one time. I mean, I was really, really sick. I felt like death warmed over and I hated every minute of it and was scared to death. Perhaps not entirely ironically, this was also a period of intense spiritual growth for me too, and today I actually am grateful to God for having allowed me to go through this. It was a small price to pay for the perspective I gained.
It is my sincerest prayer that you have peace about this, and our God is a good God, and he will sustain you if you seek him.
