12-26-07 Hello. I am a 42 year old nursing student who has come down with Graves' disease, a form of autoimmune hyperthyroidism, that also attacks the eyes and sometimes other areas of the skin. I will be logging aspects of my experience with Graves' in hopes of helping others who suffer from it.I have been having intermittent symptoms of the disease for about a year: hot flashes, irregular heartbeat, tremors, surges of high systolic BP, thinning hair, and so forth. The symptoms set in to stay in September, my eyes swelled in October, and in November, I started to get the anxiety, tremors, weakness and cognitive problems of mild thyrotoxicosis, and the labs reflected that.
When I went in with the swollen eye, my physician thought it was a beginning of cellulitis, or a sympathetic swelling from a sinus infection, but a sinus CT ruled that out. I finally asked her to check my thyroid hormone levels, and they showed hyperthyroidism, And my TSH receptor antibody titer was high, pointing to Graves'.
I thought it might be useful to post a photograph of what my eyes look like currently. The right eye has a lot of periorbital swelling and other symptoms, which wax and wane. The other eye is swollen, too, but only minimally.
So . . . I intend to post from time to time with progress notes. At least one hopes for progress.
As for the name of this blog, it stems from where I live, in northern Wisconsin, where all those beautiful white pines that fed the Cornell, Weyerhaueser, Knapp and Stout companies grew. The second generation is back and towering! This blog was meant for reporting on environmental topics in northwest Wisconsin, but, eh, life—and Graves' disease—got in the way.
3 comments:
Jus tcurious since I also have Graves and they are trying to get me to do RAI. Why didn't you ever have RAI?
I didn't do RAI (the radioactive iodine that kills the thyroid gland) because 1) I wanted to keep my thyroid functioning and 2) because I have the associated eye disease and RAI can sometimes aggravate it severely.
It's been about 26 months since diagnosis and I am in remission and off all anti thyroid meds. My eyes are not quite back to normal and my never be, but they look and feel nearly normal.
I now know that I had a bout of Graves' at age 28, with milder eye involvement, and that the remission lasted from age 29 to age 41 or so. My antibodies are back to normal level, my thyroid hormones are perfect, and I cope to have at least another 12 years' remission, maybe more!
My advice to anyone with Graves' is to try conservative treatment, first.
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