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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.
Three blood tests and several months later, my thyroid was getting more and more out of control, and so were my symptoms. I was becoming voracious. I was eating thousands upon thousands of calories a day — and losing weight! I’d also developed an appetite for juice and simple sugar that was unfamiliar to me. I was consuming a quart of juice each day. My bathroom habits also changed drastically. And the tremors and the shaking intensified.
But then a new symptom kicked in. My heart rate was steadily rising, and I wasn’t paying attention. I started getting out of breath just moving around my apartment. After heading out of my building, I would need to rest on the bench first for a few minutes before crossing the street to the supermarket. It had gotten to the point where I couldn’t move for five minutes at a time without sometimes feeling like my heart was about to give out.
At the time, I didn’t have a fitness watch, and wasn’t aware of what my heart rate…
