It’s been a while since I’ve given an update about my battle with graves disease. Lots of things going on, moving to new city, starting a new life there, work has been challenging, especially since the last 2 months when changing roles within my company. But I’m now in the first few days of the our summer holiday and finally getting a bit of rest.
The last period also ment some stress and I started to notice that a bit, feeling more tired, not as sharp as I want to and lacking energy overall. So when the time came to do another measurement I was interested to see what the outcome would be. I felt fine overall, just tired after a very busy 2 months. And of course if the dosis of 2,5 mg of Strumazol (thyroidhormone medication) did it’s job.
Results TSH
Below you can see the result of the latest TSH measurement and the trend of since march 2022 and as you can see, it’s been ‘in the green’ since may 2022 and virtually stable since end of november 2022.
Results FT4
The results of the FT4 measurements are just as stable as you can see in the graph below.
What’s next?
All in all, it’s a great result which the doctor concurred with. I was a bit afraid of the potential discussion in which she would say that it was time to stop taking medication and see how that goes. So I was almost relieved when she said that we would do another bloodtest in half a year and see what’s up.
Of course that means the decision (what to do next after stopping medication and the thyroid starts acting up again) is postponed for now, but I’m also actually fine with taking this dosis for the rest of my life. Having the ‘nuclear’ option most likely means that you will have to take medication anyway to support a slow working thyroid, but only after you (partially) destroy an organ which is not the actual culprit. And I’m reading some research which suggests that taking this small amount of medication is just fine, but there still are risks involved.
However, at one point the thyriod will start to slow down anyway, it’s just that for Graves’ patients it’s often earlier, and will you know it when that moment comes… For now I’m just glad it’s working stable and don’t have to worry about anything (fingers crossed) for the next half year.
Always Learning 