Taking care of ourselves isn't always easy.

I have Hashimoto's Hypothyroidism, which can kill you. People tend to look at it and go "it's a thyroid problem, you'll get fat, no big deal", but untreated, getting fat is the worst of your problems: it can cause coma or heart failure. And I got REALLY sick, and the ONLY reason I didn't end up in one state or the other (as my presentation was particularly bad--though I didn't gain much weight) was because as a grad student, I happened to go to a college that offered 1. good health insurance and 2. had a great on-site medical office that I could see for free, where the doctors were paid a salary and could therefore spend the time to read my ENTIRE FILE (which was by that time very thick) to figure out what was wrong with me. Which one of them did. I swear to god I've considered naming my firstborn after the her.

I am much better now, and thankfully although thanks to my husband's current job I now have excellent medical insurance (which is no small part of the reason he's working this job rather than freelancing as a copy and television writer--something he could do successfully if he devoted himself full time to it; my husband is good and experienced in that field and if you watch a Viacom network, you've probably seen something he worked on in some part) that covers both the medication that keeps me alive and my doctor's visits, I didn't have health insurance for nearly six years through no fault of my own. I was doing EVERYTHING they said you were supposed to do: I was working nearly full time, I was putting myself through college because my parents couldn't afford to send me (or to insure me) but neither my job nor my undergraduate school offered health insurance. My undergrad school offered it ONLY to foriegn students. I was literawlly at one point on my hands and knees begging the president of the college to let us domestic students buy in.

He brushed me off. "Nobody will want to do it." he said. "And I can't make an exception just for you. Go the the ER if you get sick."

(he occasionally wonders why I won't participate in any of their fund-raising or promotional materials; he's dense, I guess)

I don't think I'd have had to get as sick as I did if they had, and I lived in fear that I would get something serious, like bronchitis, or that my appendix would go, and that would be all she wrote: I'd either be dead or buried up to my eyeballs in medical debt, and there would go college, only I'd already be up to my neck in college debt and I wouldn't even have a degree to show for it.

That this didn't happen to me was, quite honestly, pure dumb luck. I know other people it happened to.

You know what's sad? It's such a treatable condition and synthroid is cheap, cheap, cheap, but without insurance I was so afraid to go the doctor (or the ER), I would never have gotten it checked until I was extremely ill.

And even when I had health insurance I STILL got dropped (retroactively, even, making the thyroid problem that had NEVER had a coverage gap a "pre-existing condition" and impossible to ensure until my husband took a job with a health plan!) by one insurer last year because I had an echo-cardiogram to confirm that a heart murmur I'd developed was innocent (it was, they still dropped me, and my attempts to fight the dropping proved futile: the state kept telling me that the health insurance company assured them my coverage loss was "within internal policy" because the company told them it was. God I wish I was making that up, but I'm not: they accepted that it wasn't pretextual, even though I had access to information suggesting it was, because the company told them it wasn't.)

I hate our health insurance industry. I hate, hate, hate, hate them, and I don't say that lightly, and it makes me furious that I have relatively little choice but to buy into their system.

And it makes me more angry the only first world country that's so eager to let the poor die, and I have a WHOLE other rant on that, but I'll save it. I've talked long enough.

People tend to look at it and go "it's a thyroid problem, you'll get fat, no big deal",

I cannot get over the sheer ignorance of some people. Part of my old job was monitoring autoimmune conditions in patients (including Hashimotos) and it is so not the same thing as the more usual hypothyroidism. Although it's awful that you can't get treated for either, since all kinds of hypothyroidisms are fairly easy to treat with thyroxine (or whatever it's called in the states) and monitoring of TSH, CT3 and Thyroid peroxidase.

I'm so sorry that you got stuck with that. The NHS may suck in a lot of ways but we have it and it's so much better than the alternative.

You ain't kidding.

Comparing the American and Canadian systems, anyway, I once listened to an American doctor and a Canadian ex-pat who was working for an American HMO argue on an airplane whether the American or Canadian system was better while sitting next to them on an airplane.

Canadian was arguing for the HMO--obviously--and the American, who had done some research in Canada, was arguing for the Canadian system.

Canadian: "Well at least here, you get to choose who you see and the doctor can choose how they treat their patients!"

American: "...you're completely deluded if you think my patients can really choose me if I can't take their plan, or that I have a free hand in treating my patients as I see fit. Because they can't and I don't. I sometimes do work for them for free just to ensure they're getting what I think is the standard of care, knowing I won't be reimbursed for it."

Canadian: "How wonderful that you are willing to work pro bono!"

American: "..."

(I kind of thought he might've slugged the guy if they'd been in a bar and not an airplane)

And let's not forget the crushing fatigue and brainfog aspects of hypothyroidism, Hashi's or otherwise! Yeah, get a job when you have trouble remembering simple words and every time you blink, you risk falling into the soft, black pit of unconsciousness.

I think my grandfather died, with dementia, of undiagnosed Hashi's. They thought it was some senile dementia... For want of a blood test and a little pill, he never saw his great granddaughter. (And that was with insurance! Dammit.) My mother was diagnosed by accident, and she nagged me to get tested and when I was finally treated, I realized I'd had it, undiagnosed, probably since I was a teenager!

Ahem. Yeah. The whole "pre-existing condition" mess just drives me up a wall, since most hypothyroidism is so bloody treatable, and levothyroxine (even brand name, like Synthroid and Unithroid) is so bloody cheap, but the necessary blood tests are a nuisance, but they're necessary and even if one just putters along with "how do I feel" one still needs a bloody prescription...

May I join you in kicking things?

You certainly may.

The levothyroxine brands are all pretty cheap--I got a three month supply at Target for fifteen bucks I think--but the blood tests come it at a hundred bucks a pop. And that can be hard to swing. And yes, I can't work without it. If I miss a pill (it happens, rarely--I have an alarm on my phone to tell me to take it) then I FEEL it the next day.

There's also the issue of finding a doc who will let you go to symptom resolution rather than just "oh, your TSH is high normal. Lets level your dose out now." At a 3 or a 4 I'm pretty damn sick. We need to push me to below a 2 to get symptom resolution, and I will fire any doctor who doesn't understand that (I have thankfully had excellent luck with my treating staff).

Even my "I want you around TSH 1" doctor has been known to go "oh, normal" when I was at TSH 2. Now I'm above 2, but she's raising my dose...

More rant: even if one gets the numbers good, but is still feeling tired? It still takes blood tests to check for other things. Hi, I have low ferritin! Time for extra iron... (Which is probably how I'm functioning without feeling totally exhausted, despite my low free T3 and above-2 TSH!)

Oh, look, more blood tests...

*beth kicks things*

(I'm glad you've had good luck with the treating staff, though! I'm over on thyroid and see the occasional horror story...)

I got lucky with the people who caught it. I got lucky with my first endo. Then I got "lucky" to marry into a family where there were five people with hypothyroidism and one who had Graves disease, and between them all they had a pretty good idea of who was good.

I've gotten jerked around by bad medical practice before. I don't tolerate it. It's gotten me labeled a diva patient sometimes the last few years, and I really don't care: if I don't feel like I'm getting good medical care, I go find someone who will take the time and listen to me. It's my life. It's nothing to an iffy doctor if I spend it feeling like a zombie but it's EVERYTHING to me.

The last time I didn't stand my ground, I ended up in a hospital for four days and it was totally and completely unnecessary AND the worst four days of my life AND the treating physician I had while I was there yanked me off my thyroid medications, which caused me to leave sicker than when I went in.

I was in there for what turned out to be complications arising from the thyroid and the doctor PULLED ME OFF MY MEDICATION.

If I wasn't trying to avoid lawsuits for various reasons right now I'd sue them for malpractice, I swear--that HAS to violate the standard of care.

So I have my horror stories, too, but my primary physicians and endos have all been great because I demand that they be great.

Even if you don't sue, you can probably still report them to the AMA... >_>

(And yeah, I've politely pestered a doctor, recently, into testing my free T3, even though their computerized system didn't have a code for it. Ha!)

You can definitely report them to the AMA and the state medical board. I'd also complain to the hospital administration, as they tend to care when their doctors are doing things that could result in them getting sued.

For the sake of the other patients that person will interact with, it'd be a really good thing to at least report them to their hospital and the AMA, no matter how long it's been.

My Hashimoto's thyroiditis (which just about did me in in the five years between coming down with it at ten and being diagnosed and treated at fifteen; at the time, it was considered a disease of middle aged women and my doctor had never seen a case of it in a teenager) is something that I absolutely cannot afford not to treat. When I was buying my own health insurance for a while there, it enraged me that I was paying quite a bit of money for...just about jack squat, since my pre-existing (well-controlled) hypothroid condition meant that all of the medical care I actually needed wasn't going to be covered for *nine months*. So I was paying for my own medical treatment and prescriptions *and* insurance, all for the chance that some day, I would have given this company enough money that they would condescend to kick in for my care.

I'm likely never going to be a full-time writer, even though it's what I'd really like to do. Working in tech pays the bills and provides health insurance, and i'm likely to be doing it for a long time to come.

Gah, yeah, i HATE that. That's why we didn't bother putting me on anything the four months between when we admitted defeat in the Great War Against the Last Insurance Carrier and when my husband's benefits kicked in. It just wasn't worth the premiums: they wanted to charge me a LOT more for the pre-existing and then not COVER it!

EDIT: should say getting fat is the least that can happen not the worst. -.-; man, I wish all that happened was that I gained weight. It wrecked my life for three years.

Hypothyroidism robbed me of four children. And mine is just bog-standard "thyroid fucking off now" hypothyroidism.

(OK, that's not entirely accurate; I was never going to have more than two children, regardless. But I would have preferred to have had them without the four additional miscarriages.)

*offers you hugs* I went through my pregnancy entirely undiagnosed -- if anything, my thyroid burned brighter during it, from what I recall. I did suffer pre-eclampsia, with no other risk factors, and my thyroid pretty much kicked the bucket afterwards, and... I was lucky. The miscarriage chances, the fetal development risks... I fail to see why pre-natal TSH testing is considered "irrelevant" by so many doctors.

I'm so sorry to hear that. :(

I had to go around with my mom ("I want grandchildren! Your ovaries aren't getting any younger." type comments; framed nicer than that, but that's what she meant and we both knew it) about why I refused to even consider having children until I had good health insurance and I knew I could get a reproductive endo if I needed one.