I wish I knew about this, but I don't.... Day 3 #nhbpm

Woo hoo, look at me, posting 3 days in a row for @wegohealth's health blog post month. No comments on any of the articles yet though, which is strange as I can see people are visiting the site. Anyway.....

Today's prompt is: "I don't know about this, but I'd like to...." 

I don't know about biology, I was so uninterested in the subject at school, can you believe, I didn't get it's relevance to me at all! How can teaching be so bad and/or curricula so ill thought through that a reasonably bright young biological being, who was let's face it as self obsessed as the next teenage girl, could go to school every day for how ever many years it was and just not clock that biology had anything to do with me?

In the UK we get to choose what subjects we will study after age 14. Up until then you just study what they tell you and in the first two years of secondary education you do all the sciences. At least that's how it worked in my school days, a zillion light years ago. I think it's still about the same.

My Mother died when I was five, not sure if I've told you that before. That has been a major thing in my life, as you can imagine. Being without a mother growing up was tough as hell. My Dad brought me up on his own. Many traumas: he bought me terrible nylon stripey jumpers to wear and wouldn't sew my Brownie badges on my uniform because he thought cowgum glue was perfectly adequate and was completely disinterested and un-supportive of my regular lobbying to go to dancing classes or majorettes because he knew that meant that he'd then have to do tricky things with sequins and ribbons on shoes for end of year shows and he was having none of it. I got my own back by becoming a punk at the earliest opportunity. I digress, that's all another story.

The reason I mention it in this post, is that I think it's pretty weird, given that my mum had some mystery illness and died so young, that I never had the urge to find out about what makes the human body tick. It's like I had some mental block.

The main reason I refused point blank to consider studying biology is because I knew that if I did they would make me dissect a bulls eye and a dead rat. Everybody in the school knew that was what biology classes entailed. No way. It was never going to happen.

I can't believe it wasn't possible to make the subject more appealing and relevant to me and all the other kids who dropped it at the first opportunity. I feel let down now. So many of my hours and days years at school were spent bored out of my tiny mind. And now I'm so filled with curiosity and awareness of my ignorance. I wish I knew more about how my body works.

I've learned a lot about thyroid disease since my diagnosis three years ago. But there is still lots that I don't know and I learn new stuff all the time. The human body and medicine is this vast and fascinating subject. Even doctors don't know it all, far from it. And I've come to realise that my symptoms have sometimes been alleviated by things other than thyroid hormone treatments. That my condition isn't as simple as being just down to one thing with one simple cure (for a long time I hung my hopes on T3 treatment because so many thyroid patient sites are so focused on that and I kind of caught the bug, but now I realise, that for me, T3 appeared to help a bit for a while but ultimately other things have had a bigger impact on my improving health.

The doctor at the fatigue clinic showed me a fascinating diagram of how all the different systems in the body are interlinked and affect each other. I got the principle but I wish I understood the detail more. I particularly wish I understood how things like nutrients and trace elements work and I wish I could identify a magic supplement I could take that would bounce my health back to being fully functioning. Ha ha, if only it was that simple.

Maybe one day I'll know all the answers..... I'll keep looking for them anyway. I know more than I used to at least, that's a start. Learning all the time.

With smiles. Thanks for reading. Feel free to share any thoughts below.

Lorraine

A health bloggers challenge - Why do I do this? #nhbpm

self scrutiny, not always recommended......
(pic from 2010)

This blog is about to go turbo charged boys and girls, stand by, hold on to your hats, a deluge, a veritable whirlwind of health blogging is about to be unleashed. Not just on this blog - health blogs everywhere are ramping up to take part in @wegohealth's National Health Blog Post Month (#NHBPM)...

Read all about the challenge here. You can even sign up to take part, how much fun would that be? All of us writing like dervishes, sharing our stories, raising awareness, rocking the world, making a difference. That Frankensandy got nothing on us! 

As it happens I could do with it not being called "national" health blog post month because I'm not in the nation that's being referred to and I suspect many other participants won't be either - hey Americans, your nation is not the whole world, the internet is bigger than your country! But never mind that, it doesn't really matter.  I'm in the UK, for what it's worth. 

The idea is that we all write a blog post every day during November. Considering I usually write about one post a month, or, erm, okay less than that sometimes.... this will be a stretch I know, but I'm up for it and I'm also excited about reading other bloggers posts. While we're all being so prolific I will make a point of reading more blogs by other people than I usually find time to do.  

The good peeps at We Go Health are providing prompts for each day. I might not always use them as I actually have quite a lot of ideas for things I want to write about, but today, as it's day one, I will stick to the script.

Today's subject is: "Why do I write about my health?"

Back when I was ill-er than I am now I used to sometimes take pictures of myself to try and gauge how ill I looked and whether or not I was getting any better.  As you can see above and below, those are not good  photos! 

Feb 2010, not looking fabulous, feeling small and sickly

April 2010, can you believe I thought I felt better so took this to see how well I looked!  Aaargh!

Not only did I look  like shit. Pardon my language. But I was totally confused. I was used to being this fairly together kind of a person. I was good at getting things done. I was articulate, successful, busy in my life. Okay so for years I'd known that something wasn't quite right about my health, I needed to pace myself more than others, I knew my immune system wasn't great, I was prone to get more colds and stuff than other people. I'd been a sickly child, had allergies and stuff. But basically up until 2009 I was doing pretty well thank you very much. Then I got the diagnosis of hypothyroidism and I thought this was a good thing, that I'd start taking the pills and could expect to feel better than I had done for years because the thyroid disease must have been causing all my previous  low level health and energy issues and now we'd found the cause and tra la la, I could keep on motoring.

Crash.
 
Well sadly it wasn't that simple, what happened then was that I got a whole lot worse before I started to get any better. It's fair to say it's been emotional and life changing. Three years down the line I'm still  not as well as I aspire to be. But to be  honest I'm now not far off it. I've learned tons of stuff about thyroid disease which  has been fascinating and I now know some good techniques for how to manage a chronic health condition and deal with adversity in general. Bizarrely I'm now living in a beautiful house right by the sea which would never have happened if I hadn't got ill and had time to reassess my hectic life, working all hours in London, as I was. So I believe that every cloud has a silver lining and I always try to look on the bright side when I can.

I started to write this blog to share my experiences, to reach out to others and to try and make some sense of what the hell was happening to me. It's been great to have this outlet and wonderful when people have commented that they can relate to how I've felt, or that information I've shared has been useful to them.

I keep writing because it helps me and other people sometimes tell  me it helps them too and that makes me happy. 

Thyroid disease is a bit of a hidden illness. One in twenty of us will get it yet many of us don't even know what a thyroid is until the day we are diagnosed, even then we often get very little info about our illness, how to manage symptoms, or how to keep as well as possible.  

As well as reaching out to other patients I also have a deeply held ambition that I can make a difference to how health professionals view and treat those of us who are unlucky enough to have a hard time with thyroid disease. I love it when a doctor or health policy person tells me they've read my blog and I actively seek out other opportunities to reach those people and get them to think differently about hard to treat thyroid patients. Because we deserve to be taken seriously and we both need and deserve to be supported back to good  health.  I believe that by speaking my truth I'm shining a light on a condition that has been terribly neglected for too long.  That makes me feel good. 

So there you go. My post number one for November, "#NHBPM", I will post again tomorrow. Yes I will. You can hold me to it. If you're doing the challenge too please let me know so I can visit your blog too. Whether you are or not I hope my gruesome pics haven't scared you off. Ha ha. Let me know what you think of this and previous posts. I love feedback. 


with love and light


Hope (Lorraine)