Had my quarterly visit to the endo again, with mixed results. Labs look okay, if a hair lower than optimal, with TSH climbing slowly. That much is good, and I would like the FT3 and FT4 to be a few tenths higher, so I felt a bit better.
The bad part is that I may be showing signs of pretibial myxedema (the swollen shins—luckily no red discoloration so far), and my distal finger joints still hurt, and more of them. I think it's thyroid-related because the pain disappeared when I was crawling toward hypothyroidism. "Could be the beginnings of acropachy," the endo said. Acropachy is the clubbed fingers that only a fraction of a percentage of Graves' patients get. So far they look okay, but they hurt.
Can't say I'm happy to be drawing the short straw and showing moderate eye disease and the shins and fingers stuff. Why couldn't this course be mild, as it was the first time around, in 1993? (and Dr. Endo agrees that I most likely had GO back then, even though I had no signs of thyrotoxicosis)
I mentioned the labile moods and impatience to the endo and he knows nothing about the long-term mental and emotional sequelae of Graves'. I'm supposed to be sweetness and light now that the thyroid has been drugged into submission. I'd send him a few abstracts on the long-term emotional impacts of Graves' from NIH . . . if I thought he'd have time to read them.
All in all I came away with the impression that an endo is good for controlling the thyroid, but nearly useless for the autoimmune and psych manifestations. Have to be my own advocate, I guess. Well, that's nothing new.
Labs, with July in bold:
TSH went from below 0.05 -> 0.17 -> 3.81 -> 3.28 -> 1.87 -> 0.47 -> 0.89
Free T4 went from 1.3 -> 0.7 -> 0.6 -> 0.7 -> 0.8 -> 0.8 -> 0.8
Free T3 went from 5.2 to 2.5 -> 2.4 -> 2.8 -> 3.0 -> 3.2 -> 2.6
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