About Me:
[Addenda:] Click here to read
This entry has been sitting in private status for several weeks and even longer in my head.....
There are probably things about me you probably don't know. Hopefully after reading this you will get some insight on why I am the person I am today
Right around the time I was entering Jr High and already dealing w/ the awkwardness of puberty, I began to exhibit several symptoms that began to worry both my parents & me.
I was beginning to shows signs of
*insomnia (which has carried over to this day),
*weight loss (over the course of 1 month I lost 30 pounds),
*eyes swelling (about a 1/3 of their normal size)
At first my parents didn't know what I had but after some investigation on my own I found out my dad had been diagnosed with something while he was living in Vietnam and asked if I could be tested.....
The day I returned to the doctor he asked me to hold out my hands......I then saw them tremble for the first time and realized I couldn't hold them still. The doctor then told me that my results came back positive.....I was diagnosed with Graves Disease. Now hearing my doctor tell me I had something called Graves Disease scared the shit out of me. He went on to tell me that Graves Disease is
not contagious
and that it's a genetic disease that I inherited from my father.
Graves Disease also goes by the medical term Hyperthyroidism. Basically the Thyroid gland in my throat produces to much of a hormone which in turn makes my body go haywire. The doctor was telling me all this and I was doing fine until.....
He gave me three options for treatment:
1) Pop Pills (30% effective)
2) Radioactive iodine syringed into my throat (90% effective)
3) Surgery that removes most of the thyroid gland (90% effective)
After hearing my options I decided I would go w/ Option #1. At the time, I didn't tell many of my friends what was going on in my personal life. They all just figured I had lost a lot of weight and had the flu or some other minor ailment. But there were some of my friends along with my family that knew I was taking 4-7 pills a day and going in for bi-monthly blood exams.
Times were very tough for me the first year after I was diagnosed. I felt like I had done something wrong and that this was my punishment.
After several years my body began to stabilize itself and I started consuming less pills and eventually switched to injections of my medication.....
I'm extremely lucky to have made it through this tumultuous time of my life and have learened to be thankful for it Sometimes when my friends ask me how I have such a great outlook on life or how I'm so upbeat almost all the time, I'm never sure what I should tell them.
What I can say now is that after everything happened...I came out much stronger than before and with a greater appreciation for my own life.
[Addenda:] I just wanted to add this little note - For the past day I've been afraid to read peoples coments out of fear of how everyone would react.
I assumed the worst and thought 1 of 2 things would happen:
1) People would over compensate for my disease and coddle me because I was "handicapped" in some sort of way
2) People would be scared to hang out with me and just concentrate on the fact I had a disease
After reading through all the comments I was able to let out a sigh of relief that has been inside me for over 10 years. Thank you to everyone who really read and understood what I was trying to share.
[Disclaimer:] I didn't write this for people to pity me.....I wrote this out of the hope people would understand....
Confused?.... so was I. So I did some investigation on his site and found this picture with these exact captions:
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