Possible Thyroid Condition? My Story May Save You Some Time & Stress
Here I share the journey of my recent hypothyroidism diagnosis.
For those of you who may be thinking: “Do I have a thyroid condition?” this is my experience from the past 2 years.
I’ve always been a doer. Active, inquisitive, a get-shit-done-er.
Running a small experience design agency the last five years, life can, at times, get hectic.
After months of increasingly sluggish mornings, an uptick in brain fog, easily becoming chilled, and thinning hair, I knew something wasn’t right with my health. Yet, every year when I went in for my annual physical, the doc would return a clean bill of health. “Try to reduce your stress,” they’d usually advise.
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As a teen, I fainted during my aunt’s wedding, after the priest declared, “Speak now or forever hold your peace.” She’s now going through a divorce.
Thinking it was a spider bite, shingles caught me by surprise, flaring up during my freshman year at college. Wasn’t that the old person’s ailment? That same year, due to excessive stress with a family death during finals, I was hospitalized for excessive dehydration.
A similar stress occurred again the night before graduation, when both sides of my family on non-speaking-terms decided to make the cross-country trek to witness the crossing of this significant life milestone.
Ironically, I’m often lauded in my work for remaining composed and calm in moments of stress and tension.
Give me a manual on reducing stress that’s not simply practicing meditation or popping a pill, and I will gladly volunteer to peruse it.
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Seeking to get to the root of this swift onset of aging and unexplained ailment, I began working with a nutritionist two years ago. We ran a bunch of tests. Adrenal fatigue. “Maggie, it looks like your adrenals are depleted and overworked,” Allison said. “What are the stresses in your life?” “Running a small business,” I said. “How’s your meditation practice?” Non-existent. “We might also want to look into testing you for SIBO and heavy metal toxicity.”
Heavy metals. Great. I’ve received advisories with every new lease agreement since moving back to San Francisco nearly 8 years ago: “This building may contain lead.” And the Hetch-Hetchy water supply? It’s arguably some of the freshest civic public water supply in the US, right? It’s actually filled with fluoride and chlorine. I drink a ton of city water, so I recently invested in a Berkey water filtration system for my apartment, and am replacing my shower head soon, since the majority of chemical absorption through skin is via a hot shower.
I couldn’t have toxic levels of heavy metals in my system, could I? Hmm.
Most swimming pools are chlorinated.
The dentist always recommends fluoridated toothpaste.
I consume tuna and swordfish on occasion, and, likely, other fish prone to high levels of mercury concentration.
On the up side, I can’t recall the last time I had food from a can, thanks to moving West as an adult (the exception being the only coconut milk I’ve been able to find that doesn’t contain additives, gums, or sugars).
The unfortunate reality, though, is that we’re constantly coming into contact with heavy metals: scents pumped into office buildings, hotels, and bathrooms, sulfates in many commercial hand washes, soaps and shampoos when you’re traveling or dining out. Even when you strive to keep your household free from chemicals, polluted air and many of the older materials in the buildings we abide in off-gas. Toxins from clothing and dry cleaning can be absorbed by your skin, yet investing in ‘clean’ dry cleaning can be cost-prohibitive. And SO MUCH plastic. Everywhere. It’s practically a full time job trying to build your life around alternatives to chemicals, additives, scents, and pesticides. I still believe it’s worth the fight though, and educating yourself so you can make informed decisions when possible.
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In January, Allison and I began a three month protocol. Herbs, supplements, and a modified diet. No gluten, caffeine, alcohol, nightshades (tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, chiles), oats, refined sugar or dairy. Butter was allowed though, due to its high (minimum 80%) fat content. Apparently the casein in dairy that creates an inflammatory response is much less in butter.
Lots of rest was the next phase. “Get around 9–11 hours a night. Be off of screens at least 2 hours before bed.”
“Minimize screen time altogether.”
“Don’t be hard on yourself for all the space you’re creating for sleep and rest. It’s time to take it easy.”
Initially, I wasn’t sure how successfully I’d adhere to the protocol.
The dietary adjustments; sure. (I’m now acquainted with just about every possible café for ‘clean eating’ and great options for coffee meetings in the SF Bay Area. If you want my list, message me.) Telling an entrepreneur of 7 years, however, to confront the nightly familiar glow of the laptop screen, attempting to squeeze out just another email response before bed, was going to be a taller task.
And more sleep. Initially I resisted the splurge, being a morning person anxious by 11am if I haven’t yet felt productive for the day ahead. It’s tough to feel ambitious when some days you’re waking up at 10am.
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I’m no longer sleeping such luxuriously long hours, as advised by Ariana Huffington, but I still adhere to no morning meetings prior to 10am. And as much as I’d love to detail a thriving morning ritual and meditation practice, I have a pretty loyal relationship to breakfast and a calm start to the day.
Occasionally I’ll take part in silent retreats at Green Gulch Farm, or weekday 5:40pm meditation at San Francisco Zen Center, consistently one of my favorite places for grounding and centering in SF. Juniper is another central option, as is the overlook at the national cemetery within the Presidio.
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After three dedicated months, I noticed an improvement on the protocol, but not as drastic as I’d hoped. I continued to give it time, switching up the herbs and probiotics, and tried to be gentle on myself striving for patience with this veiled malaise. Meanwhile, the schedule and lifestyle of an entrepreneur pushed on. I needed to learn to insert blocks between meetings and client work, otherwise my body, mind, and soul would be too exhausted to make it through what was once a typical day in the office.
Later that summer I had a concussion. The only reason I mention it is that I started getting headaches consistently. I’ll revisit this in the next chapter.
Still feeling amiss with my health — albeit getting plenty of sleep and nutrients — I wasn’t feeling better. If anything, the brain fog and short term memory were worse, and it took a ton of effort to work out or get through a yoga class at the gym. Struggling to make it to yoga had never been a challenge.
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I started seeing a new M.D. this January. New year, new health plan; renewed persistence. I detailed each of the symptoms I’d been experiencing the past two years. The doctor ordered several blood tests. On a call a week later: “Well, everything came back normal. Your thyroid stimulating hormone (TSH) is on the upper limit of normal (4.8). You could hold off on addressing it, or you could see if symptoms improve by going on a synthetic hormone [for life]. I wouldn’t have mentioned anything to you, but because you mentioned fatigue, we could look into this.”
I decided to research naturopaths and finally commit to seeing one. Fed up with the Western healthcare system, I scheduled an appointment.
“What are the options for naturally treating a thyroid condition?” I asked the N.D. “Well, first, we’d want to run a full test on your thyroid. Second, all autoimmune disorders are caused by digestive issues, so we’d want to better understand what’s happening in your gut and address your adrenals. After we receive your results, we’d likely start you on bio-identical glandulars.” The N.D. scheduled a full thyroid panel with antibodies. The antibodies determine whether the gene is turned on for Hashimoto’s or Graves disease.
To properly diagnose a thyroid condition, TSH levels are tested in addition to T3 total, T3 free, T4 total, T4 free, and antibodies. Testing the full panel yields a much clearer picture of how your thyroid is performing. Western medicine trains doctors to simply test the level of TSH. If you’re within the 1–5 range, doctors typically won’t mention anything. In my case — with a level of 4.8 when a max of 1.5 is optimal — I’d say there was pause for concern. Often, symptoms of hypothyroidism can mimic other conditions, so it’s important to do the blood work first to know conclusively if you have the condition, and second, to understand how to treat it based on the severity of your TSH levels.
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The labs come back. There’s definitely an imbalance in my thyroid production. The good news is I don’t have autoimmune hypothyroidism, meaning my antibodies tested in the low-normal range for Hashimoto’s disease, and I’m not on the path to developing it. Whew.
The N.D. spent an hour with me, reviewing my health history, sleep patterns, allergies, body temperature, nail health, irregularity vs. regularity with stool health, the quality of the fatigue I was feeling, and my sinus function. She wanted to address my digestion, adrenals, energy, and mental clarity. Unlike the M.D., she actually gave me a neck exam, to test for a physical presence of a goiter. “You have a slight pronouncement to the right of your Adam’s apple,” she observed. The thyroid is a delicate, butterfly-shaped gland located mid-neck, just behind the Adam’s apple.
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Back at home, I test everything from my saliva, to breath, to poop. For those who’ve experienced autoimmune or digestive issues, you know the excitement I’m not alluding to.
I started researching. I learned the difference between hyper- and hypothyroidism, and the conditions for Hashimoto’s and Graves’ disease.
I had questions like:
- What is the thyroid?
- Why is optimal functioning important, significantly so for women?
- Will I lose my thyroid? What happens in that case?
- Am I hyper or hypo?
- How do I know if I have Hashimoto’s disease, and is it curable?
- Can the condition of the thyroid improve; can the damage be reversed?
- How might I approach healing through nutrition?
- How are the gut and the thyroid linked?
- Why is gluten particularly dangerous for the thyroid?
- Do I really have to give up raw kale, arugula, brassicas, capers, and radishes from my diet — all members of the cruciferous family?
- Where does stress fit into all of this?
- Do the thyroid hormone pills actually help cure the condition?
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Once again, I started a fresh round of supplements, tinctures, and herbs. Additionally, I started taking the closest-to-natural thyroid hormone on the market. It’s even coated in coconut!
I continued to research the condition, reading voraciously. Discouragingly, there’s a ton of conflicting information on thyroid disorders, and lots of writing saying there’s actually not much research available on autoimmune and thyroid conditions. Most autoimmune diseases are considered a medical mystery. Doctors will often try to treat the symptoms, but they can’t give you a definitive answer on what’s causing the condition, explains Anthony William, author of Medical Medium. They can guess, but often when they do, they’re wrong, since they don’t fully understand what’s going on in the body.
I’ve learned there’s a minimum 3-month waitlist to see an endocrinologist in most U.S. cities since there’s a shortage of practitioners and most are dedicating time to patients with diabetes. The irony is that all autoimmune disorders are interconnected through nutrition, exercise, lifestyle patterns, and the health of one’s microbiome. In some cases there is even a 3-month wait to see some of the Bay Area’s naturopaths.
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In all of my research, I came across two fascinating hypotheses which actually debate much of the available advice on autoimmune conditions. I’ll dive into these in the next installment.
-MFS
