Beginning The Journey While Earnestly Clinging To Hope

{This is a letter that I wrote to my sister almost exactly a year ago on October 31, 2010, one week after I was diagnosed with Hashimoto's Thyroiditis, and two months after I dropped out of my sophomore year of college.  It captures well the crude, depressive nature of the disorder, the effects it had not only on my body and mind, but on my friendships and relationships as well, and most importantly, it shows the hope that has brought me to the point I am at today:  healthy and strong.}

Dear Kaitlyn,


I have not properly shown my undying affections and undenounced love for you and all things lively about your spirit.  Nothing, ever EVER can change how much I love you and value your friendship and loyalty to me.  I know that I have been increasingly absent the past year, and I'm not sure if I can ever fully express my regret and self-resentment for that.  I'm so sorry my sister that I have not had the physical and psychological balance and strength to be the friend that you deserve to have in your life.


In order for us to properly catch up, I need to explain to you the intensities of the difficulties in my life this past year.  And in order to properly explain, I must give a short sypnosis of my lfie.  Bare with the redundancies, for the repetition of things will shine the most beauteous secrets buried behind our human eyes.


I have Hashimoto's Thyroiditis.  It is an autoimmune disease (an autoimmune disease means that your immune system is failing and attacking your own body's tissues) that I will have for the rest of my life.  My immune system is attacking my thyroid and eventually it will destroy it completely.  It is not fatal at all, but I am going to have to very strictly monitor my diet, exercise, sleep, and medications for the rest of my life.  To the point that it will be absolutely ridiculously annoying and I won't be able to eat hardly any foods served in any kind of restaurant.  Not to mention that I will be struggling with the symptoms of this disease and hypothyroidism also for the rest of my life.  There are so many symptoms...... body aches, muscle aches, joint pain, migraines, depression, anxiety, mania, hypoglycemia, rapid heart rate, slow heart rate, weight gain, chronic constipation, swollen neck, muscle cramps, intense fatigue, irregular menstruation, infertility, increased PMS, mood disturbances, cloudy thinking, memory loss, and even more.  Those at least are all the symptoms that I have dealt with the most.  Okay, now that I have introduced you to the disease that I have (I was diagnosed on Thursday), I will continue with my story of struggling with every aspect of my health.


I left for college in August 2009.  Within days of being there, I was bedridden with a fever of 103 degrees. I was sick for the entire week and I missed my first set of classes.  It was a terrible way to start college.  It set me behind in everything, meeting friends, getting along with my teachers, homework, adaptation, etc., and in retrospect, it was the first time that my thyroid got me sick.


A couple months went by, I only had colds and some problems with fatigue, I was feeling good in general, missing you and Sena and Kelsey for sure, though.  Right before Halloween I got hit with Swine Flu.  Imagine the throwing up flu and the achey flu put together and multiplied by ten. That is swine flu.  I came back a week and a half later and finished up the semester rather successfully. 


Over Christmas Break is when I started to notice the psychological changes in me.  I couldn't get along with people the same way that I used to.  Something was just off when I was around others.  I wouldn't know what to say and I didn't want to say anything.  I felt so tired and sick and that was all I could think about.  Then my parents started to trigger my manic (which basically just means crazy) and anxious distress.  I would react to them just extremely nuts.  I had lost control of my emotions, and I had always had control over them.  That was the second time I knew something was really wrong with me.


I went back to school and got sick AGAIN with the flu within days.  I came back home for a week and a half.  I got sick with tonsilitis a week after I recovered and returned to school, and honestly, I had tonsilitis from January to March 29th right when I got my tonsils out.  And no one cared at school.  My professors told me they were going to fail me for not participating in class without even flinching.  My friends still insisted that I stay up late, drinking and smoking, and they refused to think I was sick with much more than a cold.


Then I left.  I had to immediately get my tonsils taken out.  That is what the doctor that investigated my throat told me.  I was thrilled.  I was sure that I would be recovering within weeks after my surgery. On March 29th, a day after I started dating Nick, I got those damn tonsils chopped out.


April 29th rolled around...... then May 15th.... when everyone came home from college.  I felt worse than I had felt all year, except I didn't have a fever or swollen tonsils to explain it.  I just ignored my pain and fatigue.  Seriously, Kait, I could not go 6 hours awake in the day without yawning and slumping my shoulders, trying everything not to go curl up in bed.  And when I was with the people that I was most comfortable with, I still felt like a foreigner.  I couldn't even think about what I was thinking, let alone talk or laugh without having to exert every ounce of energy left in my body.  Then after interacting with someone, I would sit and think with paranoia about all the ways our relationship was going wrong. 


My life continued this way, my friendships stayed dull and stagnant, sometimes even raped by my distressed thinking.  I would think terribly negative things and think that none of you girls loved me anymore.  And my health, well it got worse, much much much much worse.  I began to have what are called thyroiditis attacks.  They would happen at night whenever I was trying to sleep.  I would lay in bed and my whole body would start to itch.  So i would put lotion on.  The itch would continue, usually getting worse.  It felt like poision ivy under my skin all over my body.  Then I would have joint pains.  My hands and elbows and shoulders and hips and ankles and knees would literally throb and ache.  It felt like someone was plucking my tendons like a guitar string.  Then my body would ache.. aaalll. over. I could literally see my muscles just throbbing.  It was the same thing as an eye twitch but painful and in my biceps, quads, calves, and forearm muscles.  After a terrible night of no sleep and too much torment, I would wake up with a rigid neck.  I literally would not be able to move it.  Then came all the emotional stuff...... I would evade negative thoughts for ten minutes on a good day, on a normal day, that's all that went through my mind.  Terrible stuff.  Awful thoughts.  Things that I wouldn't even write down because they were too tormenting to put in black and white.  I will spare the details.


I was going crazy.  And no one knew it.   My immune system was literally shutting down.  So it started to attack my thyroid.  It though that it was a foreign bad guy in my body and it literally sent antibodies to destroy it.  OH gosh, it all makes sense now, but in the meantime, let's just say that I was starting to write my goodbyes to everyone.  


So I went to the doctor.  Dr. **** told me that I needed to see a psychiatrist when I told him all of my symptoms and explained my night terror attacks.  Thankfully he ordered a blood test whose results showed an increase in TSH hormone, basically saying that my hormone was secreting too much of the hormone it makes to try make up for the destruction my immune system had caused on it. 


This was a relief, because not only had I spent my summer crazy in pain, depression, tiredness, and manic behavior, but I had a nervous breakdown (all my symptoms combined x 10) for an entire week surrounding my return to earlham.  I couldn't even go to school. Ahhhhhhhhhhhhh, the shame and disappointment and stress of returning home when my parents thought that I was going crazy and my dad thought that I was lazy and unaccomplished and ugly and fat and miserably worthless (he told me that).  And all my friends thought I dropped out to get engaged to Nick, when really, I was hiding the problems I was facing
 

I gave up at one point, and decided that I was destined for a life of sin.  I thought that I had betrayed God so much that I was put in hell.  I had made up my mind that hell was living a human life knowing about God and knowing what it would be like to live in Him, but you weren't allowed to because you had already decided at one point in your sinful nature that you didn't want God.  I thought that I was in hell.  Wow, crazy to write down and read so blatantly on this webpage, but it's the truth.


I am starting to recover now, not really physically yet, I'm still very very sick, but emotionally and mentally.  I know that my moments of extreme moodiness, depression, distress, panic, and paranoia are not me.  I know that honestly, I will be bigger, better, stronger, and happier.  Not to mention, more doubly loving, energetic, outgoing, uplifting, deep, and insightful than I have ever been in my entire life.  But most importantly, I know that in my thyroid recovery, I will have the undying capacity and inspiration to love you and all my brothers and sisters and lovers granted by the God that tied us together in the womb of time's existence, and I will travel the world with culture's sweet kisses dripping from my lips and smiles curling the souls I touch.  Oh praise the maker of the earth and other worlds that touched our soul's with the life and love of human existence.  My spirit is forever transcendental and I won't let this little sickness of mine grab me by the balls anymore.  My heart beats, pounding berry blood, deep in purple passion for you and the other lovers of my soul. 

Amen to the struggles and capsized peaks at the end of the climb at the end of a life stage.  I made it up the first set of my life's mountain ridges, and the view is captivatingly magic. 

Now I'm onto the next mountainline....

join me, sister.