I was having a cry on my palliative care consultant (who has literally changed my life for the better) earlier on today, and he told me that there's a chance that this particular trough of depression may be being caused by my thyroid problem. It appears that rather than just plain old thyroid insufficiency I have Hashimoto's disease, which is an auto-immune condition which, when thyroxine treatment is started, causes the thyroid to continue to reduce function repeatedly, resulting in an ever-increasing thyroxine dose until no thyroid function remains.
This means that every time you think that you have the dose correct, your thyroid gives up just a bit more and you end up underdosed again, and the oedema and other symptoms continue like you haven't increased the dose until you bottom out with no natural thyroid function and finally get stabilised on the right dosage. I clearly still have some function in my thyroid as I'm only a couple of years into the treatment, but this accounts for all of the continuing problems that I'm having.
From tomorrow I start taking a higher dosage and I hope that this will reduce the peripheral oedema and depression at the same time as making my eyebrows grow back (crossed fingers!) but it will only be until the condition worsens and I need another increase in dosage.
I really could live without another complex multi-system disease but clearly my permission is not needed for this process. At least this one has the side effect of making all of my medication free for life.
Remember we are ALL "Over Comers" Sounds like many of us have been through some of the same things. But because we have survived it, we are who we are. Fighters! We have "Overcome" things maybe in our society we shouldn't have, but we have. And because of that , We can hold our heads up high, and know we "Overcome" what happened to us. Big hugs to you all.
