Graves' Disease
Lupus
Hashimoto's Disease
Crohn's Disease
Fibromyalgia
All of these are autoimmune disease that can cause a variety of symptoms and cause the person living with the condition more challenges than most can imagine. The thing about these diseases is that most often, you can't see them... you have no idea the person dealing with the every day issues even has anything wrong with them. There is no cure and treatment varies in success.
I should know. I have Graves' Disease.
It's in my biography. You can read a line or two about it in my EPK, but unless you know me or happen to catch a random post about it when I'm frustrated, you would never know it to look at me. See, I'm blessed. To date, I've only suffered from the silent symptoms... the invisible things happening internally. Unless you're a doctor, you'll probably never notice when one side of my throat is enlarged (has a goiter) and is bigger than the other. My dry eyes and sometimes hard time swallowing will go unnoticed. Unless I point it out, you'll miss my shirt shaking from the heart palpitations. The nights I'm up cleaning house or writing because sleep refuses to come for days or even weeks at a time, you'll attribute to my personal drive. And the times when I can't keep my eyes open and falls asleep despite by best efforts because my body is crashing, you'll never witness. Only my family and loved ones have witnessed all that.
I remember when they finally diagnosed me back in 2006. I wasn't feeling well that day. Nothing particular was wrong. I didn't have a fever, wasn't nauseous, or anything like that. I just didn't feel well. I had my girls, my niece, and a couple other children at my house so I called my doctor's office and left a message for the nurse to see what he wanted me to do. They took too long to call back and for some reason, I felt like I should go to urgent care. I just knew something wasn't right. (Listen to your inner voice people.) Anyway, I went to urgent care and between checking in and sitting back in the room waiting on the doctor to come in, about an hour and a half had passed. After all, I wasn't exhibiting any signs of distress or a medical emergency so they just put me in a room to wait. The kids were getting hungry (it was about 7pm by this time) and the nurse practitioner came in. She asked the same generic questions they always do while getting out her stethoscope to take a listen (again, like they always do). Everything was going as usual until she put the stethoscope over my abdomen (your aorta runs from your heat down behind where your belly button is) and she stopped speaking in mid sentence, turned to look back through my chart, and then turned to ask me if I'd ever had an ultrasound of my heart. Huh? Did she just ask me about my heart? Yup. She sure did.
I told her that I hadn't and asked why she was asking. She wouldn't answer and then asked if I minded if she went and got Dr. Lee (whom I knew very well) and I said "Why don't you do that?" Lol (Looking back I might have been a little rude right then... but she was asking about my heart so I feel I should get a pass.)
Anyway... Dr. Lee comes in asking about my recent weight loss, if I'd been working out, had less of an appetite, etc. All the while, he's listening to my chest/stomach and speaking like everything's okay. Then he asks if there's anyone else with me besides the kids or if any of them can drive. The answer to both of those questions was "no". He tells me that my resting heart rate is 136 and he wants me to drive across the street to the emergency room. I tell him that I need to feed the kids first and he says I can't. Tells me to drive straight there, have my niece call my husband (I was married then), and he's calling ahead to tell them I'm coming so they can take me straight back.
And that... was the beginning.
At least now I had a name for it, a reason for the things everyone was judging me on. You see, for months people had questioned me about my weight loss, my energy or fatigue (whichever they happened to notice). My church had even made me step down from working with the youth because they thought I was addicted to the pain meds from knee surgery (which I wasn't). But the problem was they couldn't see my disease and my hands shaking/weight loss combination gave them enough evidence to pass judgment even though I feel like they should have known better.
And I was hurt. Still am. To this day I feel some kinda way for being taken away from my babies (the teens & youth I worked with) because we had/have a special bond and I didn't do anything wrong. I was sick. I just didn't know it. And to make it worse, the pastor's wife was a nurse. How's that for ironic.
I'm sharing all of this not to point fingers or anything like that, but to say be careful when making assessments about people. You have no idea what they're dealing with on a daily basis. Yes, I said daily basis. There's no cure for these illnesses. Doctors have no idea why we get them and are literally "practicing" medicine in their treatment of them. Some things work well for certain people and not at all for others. The autoimmune system is complex and once you get one disease, you are prone to get others which is scary when you know that MS and Parkinson's Disease are part of this group as well.
I choose to not let it rule my life. I deal with it and keep living. You only get one life after all, right?
I've included a few links below on Graves' and other autoimmune diseases. Take a look if you're interested. If not, just remember that people deal with more than you could ever see and sometimes the silent symptoms aren't evidence that it's not physical.
(the video below is from a couple nights ago when my heart was palpitating... sometimes it beats fast and other times just hard enough to shake my shirt/lift objects on my stomach)
http://womenshealth.gov/publications/our-publications/fact-sheet/autoimmune-diseases.cfm
http://womenshealth.gov/publications/our-publications/fact-sheet/graves-disease.cfm
http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/graves-disease/DS00181
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