Learning to Live With It

     I had a relatively normal childhood, as much as any childhood can be normal. I groaned about homework, played with my friends as often as possible, and I always went to Grandma’s house when I wanted some extra treats. I was just your average awkward high school student, and everything seemed fine. It wasn’t until about a month into my sophomore year when I really noticed that I felt generally unwell, and maybe had for a while. I was always tired, and the feeling didn’t change no matter how many hours of sleep I got. It became difficult to focus, and it took everything I had just to stay awake, even in the classes that I loved. Despite having always been a straight-A student, my grades started slipping as even the simplest assignment seemed impossible to do.

    My mom started taking me to doctor's appointments, and I was tested for everything from Mono to Leukemia. I got somewhere around ten blood tests in a 3-week period, and we were still left with questions. I was so frustrated with my body, knowing that I should be capable of doing more yet struggling to find the energy to get out of bed. For a while, my doctor suggested I had fallen into a major depression episode (I had been previously diagnosed with depression a couple years before, and had managed it just fine that whole time.) but I knew that wasn't it. I wanted to do all of the things I had been doing, but I couldn't. I felt awful, and the worst part was not knowing why. I broke down, frustrated with a body that didn't work and doctors that kept telling me "it's all in your head." It's an awful feeling, to know that there is something very wrong when a professional is telling you that everything is fine.

    Frustrated, my mom kept pushing, kept taking me to new doctors, and one day she finally got an endocrinologist to test me for something she had wondered about all along- thyroid irregularities. (She later told me that she'd had the same problem when she was around my age, but wasn't diagnosed with it until she was 30.) The thyroid is a butterfly-shaped gland in your neck, and the hormones it produces affect just about every bodily function you have. Turns out, my thyroid levels were devastatingly low, and my doctor was surprised I was even up and walking around. The diagnosis? An autoimmune disease called Hashimoto's Thyroiditis, a condition where my body essentially doesn't recognize my thyroid as part of it's system, so it attacks the gland and makes it difficult for the thyroid to produce the needed hormones.

    I was immediately put on a synthetic thyroid hormone, and with careful monitoring and monthly blood tests, I eventually got to a point where everything was "normal." The chronic fatigue had lessened, but never fully faded from my daily activities. I was glad to at least have a name for what was wrong with me. But with the diagnosis came a fact that I wasn't prepared for- there is no cure. It's treatable, usually manageable, but it will be a problem I have to deal with for the rest of my life. It was a part of me now; blue eyes, size 8 shoes, and an autoimmune disease that needed constant monitoring. It was hard to hear, and even harder to come to terms with, but I didn't really have a choice considering the disease would now be my lifelong companion. It was, and still is, something that I struggle to deal with on a long-term basis.

    Since then, I've been diagnosed with two other autoimmune diseases, as well as a couple of other chronic health issues with lifelong effects. Each new diagnosis was like a punch in the face- just another thing wrong with me, another thing to make my daily life that much more difficult. I still struggle to deal with the implications of having several incurable life-long conditions, I still feel like a failure when I don't complete a daily to-do list because I just don't have the energy. I still deal with awkward questions, and people who just can never really understand what I mean when I say I'm tired. But here I am, day after day, learning to live with it.