Expecting an argument, I asked to go home.
He hit the roof. Well, sort of hit the roof for a well-trained doctor. “I disagree adamantly with your decision to go home.” His face reddened. “You can’t go home without doing something about your thyroid. A thyroid as overactive as yours is dangerous.” He ran his eyes over the chart and wielded it like a stick. “Don’t take this lightly, Jan.” He stumbled over my name as if unsure of who I was. “I want you to really think about letting me irradiate your thyroid gland before you go home and possibly die.”
“I can’t,” I answered, a bit perturbed that he wasn’t sure of my name. “I just can’t. Let me go home and I’ll see you next week. I’ll call if I get worse or something.”
Reluctantly, he agreed. Immediately after he left the room, I gathered up my belongings, pulled on my sweats, and prepared to go home. “I hope my car is still in the lot,” I thought with uncertainty. “I drove myself to the emergency room three days ago. I guess I’ll drive myself home,” I murmured.
Before I left the hospital I listened again to the doctor’s warnings and instructions and filled the pile of prescriptions he loaded on me at the hospital pharmacy. I agreed to take all my medicine as directed until my final decision was made. If my thyroid lasted, that was. I also agreed to see him once a week for blood tests. His last words to me were a warning.
“Prolonged use of this thyroid medication could destroy your immune system. Yes,” he told me, his eyes narrowing, “no one really knows the long-term effects of this medication. You need to make a decision about what you are going to do with your thyroid soon, because you could destroy your immune system in a matter of months. Then you’ll really be in trouble.”
I looked at it differently. The doctor had no idea what caused Graves’ disease. He wasn’t sure if the medication would kill me before my thyroid did, and if I did have my thyroid destroyed, he didn’t know what the thyroid supplement would do to me on a lifetime basis. None of the options he was offering me seemed good. So I wasn’t ready to grab at any of them.
I knew I was taking a chance walking out of the hospital, but I also knew that I needed time to find out if there were other options.
With a lurching gait, I stumbled down the hallway to check out at the floor desk. I waited for the nurse to process my final paperwork and, without really focusing, listened to her boiler-plate instructions on what to do when I got home. A few minutes later, feeling tired and weak I stumbled into the elevator and disappeared while she went looking for a wheelchair to push me out per hospital protocol.
Arriving home before Chuck picked the kids up from daycare, I examined my house as if I’d never been there before. Being diagnosed with a deadly disease abruptly changes the way one looks at life, I thought to myself.
Walking into the kitchen, I paused. The familiar smell felt like home. Tears formed in my eyes. Funny how scents can remind you of certain things: family gatherings, favorite meals, good and bad times. I was glad to be home, even though I was a bit unfocused. I tried to calm myself so I could appear normal for the sake of the boys. My husband barely noticed me anyway these days and didn’t seem to care. But the children never saw me wired to tubes while I was lying sick in the hospital. I hoped they never would.
As I stood there galvanizing what little strength I had left, I tried to think through my problem. “I guess I’d better find a way to strengthen my immune system while researching the cause of my Graves’,” I declared out loud. “By becoming physically stronger, I’ll encourage my body to defy the Graves’ and the infections I keep getting. I refuse to surrender my health to anyone or anything!” I wanted to develop a plan to make the Graves’ just “go away,” but I was overwhelmed by trying to figure out where to begin.
I took a deep breath. The best place to start, I told myself, was with myself. I thought about my daily routine and began scrutinizing what I did in a typical day as if looking for clues to a crime. “There has to be a reason why I have Graves’ disease. I’ll simply pick my life apart until I find it. And I will find the reason! I won’t stop until I do.” My heart skipped a beat and began to pound. I must find the answer fast, too, I realized. My thyroid might not last. I might not last.
I opened the pantry door and stood there staring at the packed shelves. I was not sure what I was looking for, but since I’d been steadily gaining weight over the past year, the pantry seemed like a good place to start. As an environmental engineer, I knew a lot about chemicals, so professional curiosity pointed me in this direction, too.
I eyed the boxed foods and began to scrutinize the labels sated with preservatives. I counted numerous vacuum packages of low-fat, sugar-free snacks and boxes of artificially flavored, sugar-free drinks. Hmm. Then I wandered over to the refrigerator and peered inside. Let’s see. There was fat-free, sugar-free yogurt, low-fat processed cheese and margarine, bottles of diet soda, and packaged carrot sticks, which looked slimy. Opening the freezer, I studied the boxes and bags of low-fat, sugar-free diet entrees, frozen veggies saturated with fat-free cheese sauces to help them go down better, fat-free, sugar-free ice creams, and low-fat processed fish sticks.
My thoughts crawled in slow motion now as I tried to analyze what, if anything, was wrong with this picture. I shrugged. Nothing, I thought. I’ve simply been watching my weight by eating fat-free, sugar-free foods. But as I stood there, it dawned on me that I didn’t really know what was inside these “wonder” packages. I began my new investigation by grabbing a piece of paper and a pen from the counter and assembling a list of all the chemicals in my foods. I realized for the first time in my life that proper nutrition in today’s world is not what foods to eat, but what artificial, man-made chemical foods not to eat! I was no dummy, yet I had never been aware of the many chemicals, usually labeled as preservatives, found in just about everything. Maybe it’s the food chemicals making me sick, I thought.
Out of habit, I grabbed a diet soft drink and noticed NutraSweet’s familiar swirl logo on the label. I looked at the ingredients and read the word aspartame. Without hesitating, I sipped the drink thirstily.
Before I finished the soda, however, I developed one of my migraines. That’s when it came to me: the realization that I only started to drink diet soda about a year or so before and that was when all my problems began. Another image came to my mind. A few days before I was hospitalized, I was driving home from the university sipping my usual cold diet drink which I bought every day before leaving campus, and a migraine hit. I had to pull off the road. I became excited. In fact, usually, before I finished the contents of a soda can, I developed a headache. Could the diet drinks be the source of these dreadful headaches? But how? Could this have anything to do with my Graves’ disease?
Then another worry surfaced. If a diet soda could cause me such painful headaches, imagine how sensitive children’s little bodies are to what’s in a diet drink. Oh my gosh, I thought, I’ve been feeding aspartame to my kids!
The more I thought about it, the more the words “fat-free” and “sugar-free” worried me. They were nothing but artificial additives flooding supermarkets. Perhaps fake foods saturated with chemicals did more harm to the body than good.
I walked over to the kitchen cabinet, grabbed another bottle of diet soda and studied the label. Why did I suffer a migraine immediately after drinking a diet drink? A coincidence? I didn’t think so. A due? It seemed possible.
How many chemicals did I eat in a day, I wondered? Even worse, how many chemicals was I unknowingly feeding my children?
I grabbed one of my sugar-free food packages from the pantry and read the label. Natural flavors, aspartame, disodium guanylate, partially hydrogenated vegetable oil, disodium EDTA added to preserve color, TBXQ and citric acid in propylene glycol to help protect flavor, the bovine growth hormone, monosodium glutamate, and BHT added to help preserve freshness. I felt sick to my stomach.
Was this why I felt tired all the time, unpredictably moody, dangerously depressed, quick tempered, crampy, bloated, or fat? I didn’t want to be sick anymore.