Going Hypo

Four years and nine months ago I was admitted to hospital suffering from a Thyrotoxicosis Storm.

For the previous eighteen months I had been losing weight without even trying. I was not dieting, but I had no idea why I was losing weight. and it never occurred to me to research the reasons online. Besides, I had gone back in school in the hopes of being able to update my skills, so I was quite busy with homework and looking after my family,

I was released from the hospital 6 days later with a diagnosis of Graves Disease which means my thyroid was HYPER active. I was given a prescription for Methimazole (aka Tapazole) which is an anti-thyroid drug (ATD). My blood results showed that my Antibodies were through the roof, and my TSH was severely suppressed.

The TSH is a measurement of the pituitary gland to determine how much thyroid hormone is in the blood. If there is little Thyroid hormone in the blood, the pituitary sends a message to the thyroid to make more thyroid hormone. If there is too much Thyroid hormone in the blood, the pituitary tells the thyroid to stop making it.

Too little Thyroid hormone usually means an underactive thyroid, or HYPO thyroid state. Too much thyroid hormone and we call that a HYPER thyroid state.


The idea of this Tapazole was to help my hyroid to stop making so much Thyroid hormone. For most of the last 3 years I have been taking this Tapazole, and sometimes my TSH rose and other times it fell. Each time the TSH rose or fell, my Tapazole dose had to be adjusted.

The results of my blood tests done in May 2014, showed that my TSH was back down to being suppressed ( as in < 0.1). So my doctor told me to increase my tapazole from 5mcg daily to 10 mcg daily. In order to bring it up. So this is what I did.

Over the next four months the weight piled on and I began to find it harder to move around, to breathe and most of my clothes no longer fit me any more. So I stopped going out unless I absolutely had to.

Last month, August 2014, I went back to the doctor for more blood tests. The very next day my apartment was in chaos as the floor people moved in, and spent the next 4 days uprooting our lives, ripping out the carpet and laying down a wooden floor. During this time of chaos the doctor's nurse called asking me to come in and discuss my blood test results. I was not told that it was urgent, so I didn't go in. My apartment was in chaos and it was taking us a while to get everything back into some decent order.

My weight was slowly climbing and there wasn't anything I could do about it. I knew I was having hypo symptoms, but the last blood test said I was not hypo. Things really couldn't change that fast, could they?