What I Learned Living With Graves Disease
In August 2018, my regular health checkup showed a spike in my thyroid activity for the first time.
I had started experiencing symptoms in May. At first, there were slight but noticeable changes to my eating habits and my appetite. I was eating larger and more unhealthy meals, and I was losing weight. But it was Ramadan at the time, and I was fasting, so it was hard to tell that anything was wrong. The first real symptom I definitely noticed was the shaking. I was shaking everywhere. The tremors in my legs were uncontrollable. I started to have some difficulty even standing in the shower for longer than a few minutes. My hands were shaking too.
I attributed all of it to a poor diet and a lack of exercise. I’d had started going to the gym for the first time earlier that year, but I’d stopped after a few months and slipped back into my old habits.
When the blood test showed later that my thyroid function was, in fact, abnormal, I went to see a physician. The abnormality was still nothing to worry about, the spike was not that high. The physician dismissed the issue and said it’d probably “go away on its own”, but he wanted to repeat the blood test just in case. The test I’d done was a personal subscription with the health service Thriva. My doctor wanted to do an official one.
