The last 4 months have been pretty crazy for me. To begin the year my partner got down on one knee and proposed!! So exciting!!
Then I had my check up with the surgeon and they said that all my levels are good, I still have quite bad shakes in my hands from too much thyroxin but because it was cancer i have to have too much so there is no re-growth. I have learnt though that this gets worse if I miss meals/go long periods of time without eating (not on purpose!). I also am still getting the heart palpitations that can get pretty bad, to the point that I do consider phoning for an ambulance, but again I am learning what to avoid. Coffee is a definite no :( as is Pepsi/Coke which isn't great as me and my partner LOVE Pepsi! The worst thing though is the chocolate. If I eat more than 2 squares of the stuff my heart starts racing, and if that is in the evening before bed, I won't be able to fall asleep for hours. Even if I avoid all of that I can still hear my heart beat in my ears most of the day!
At work I'm pretty busy and on my feet all day as an infant school teacher, but in the evening I seem to get a second wind and can keep going til about 11, however as soon as my head hits the pillow it is lights out! Seriously I can be asleep in 10 seconds (my partner is considering entering me into the Guinness Book of Records!) When it is the school holidays though, it is a different story. I'm lethargic all day I'm tired when I wake, I'm lethargic during the whole day, I'm tired in the evening but I can't sleep, and take ages to drift off then usually wake at least twice during the night. Going to try going to the gym during the holidays to see if that helps, but it is really annoying.
So anyway, back to the check up, they said everything was great (as great as it can be) then they noticed my engagement ring and said "I think we should have the baby chat". What baby chat? Why do we need a chat? I assured them I wasn't pregnant and I wasn't planning on getting pregnant anytime soon, but she insisted on the "baby chat". Apparently, I think I understood this correctly, when you first get pregnant your body naturally increases your thyroxin levels, as to make the babies brain it uses up alot of thyroxin. Obviously I have no thyroid so my body can't naturally increase the levels. Therefore I have to meticulously plan when I am going to fall pregnant and rush to the doctors to have them increase my thyroxin by 25-50mg. Bare in mind that I am already shaky with a racing heart on the measly 150mg I am on at the moment, and you can imagine the worry going through my brain. If this all goes to plan the baby 'should' have a 'normal' brain. Great. I hate the whole statistics thing (refer back to diagnosis!!). So that was thrilling to find out, I do think they should have told me the risks to pregnancy before they took the thyroid out, although I know it wouldn't have made a difference as I would have told them to go ahead anyway to remove the cancer, but I do think you should know these things.
So that was stressful enough, then I had to go to the doctors the following months with girly problems that I put down to hormonal change due to the lack of a thyroid (when you research the thyroid controls alot of stuff!). The doctor took one look and sent me as an emergency straight off to the hospital with suspected Cervical Cancer. Yep that's right. Urgent referral, again, yay :(
After many gruelling and horrific tests, including an ultrasound where I had to have a full bladder for 3 hours (they were running late on appointments...thanks), they determined that in fact I did not have the big C as the doctor put it (seriously, she said "the big C"), but my body was going through hormonal changes and this was effecting the uterus. I am not a qualified doctor/GP/surgeon/God of the NHS but I could have told them that in the beginning and saved myself 3 months of tests, waiting for results and STRESS!! The thing you are supposed to avoid to help you stay healthy.
So anyway I'm writing this rant because I was sitting in traffic this week listening to the radio and I realised this month last year was the one where they got the biopsy results back and rushed me into hospital, removed my entire thyroid and announced that I had had cancer, it was so small they weren't sure how they caught it so early, but that I would be ok. It's a year on and I'm still trying to be ok.
