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Graves' Disease Resource Page
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PAULA'S STORY Beginning in 1993, I entered the worst 3 years of my life. In June of that year our then 2 y.o. daughter broke her leg in her first attempt at climbing out of her crib. She was in a cast for 3 months. The following month, my Mom died of colon cancer. In January of 1994 I was called into jury duty and ended up as a juror on a civil trial that lasted 4 1/2 months. After the trial, I had a bone fusion done to my right ankle and was in a cast for 6 months. In August of '94 my Dad died - 13 months after my Mom. I inherited their house, so with me in a cast and unable to help pack, we moved into my parents' house. After going through all this stress in my life, I phoned my HMO one day to say that I felt like I was "losing my mind." I hooked up with a psychiatrist there and was treated for depression. Not hard to understand after all the crap that our family had been through. During this time I would fly off the handle very easily and had zero tolerance. I would cry at the drop of a hat and my voice got really high pitched. I felt restless all the time and couldn't sit still. While I was being treated by the psychiatrist I started to develop hand tremors. My Dr. attributed it to anxiety. A few weeks later my menstrual periods started getting further and further apart and lighter and lighter. I called my GP who told me I was probably entering peri-menopause. This made sense (I was 43 at the time) and surely this explained the wild mood swings I was having and my intolerance to heat. I remember sitting in work in the dead of winter with a short sleeved shirt on and a small fan on my desk while my co-workers would have on heavy sweaters and be shivering. Despite all these weird symptoms, I felt that mentally I was at the point where I could start accepting all the bad stuff that had happened to me and felt that I could cope with it. My last day of therapy was one morning in February '95. When I went into work after that doctor's session, I was told by my supervisor that I had to find a new position at Harvard University where I worked. My boss' appointment as Chairman of the department was up and the incoming Chairman wanted an assistant who spoke Spanish. I felt totally devastated and broke into tears as I ran to the phone to call my therapist whose office I had left an hour earlier. After many interviews (which were extremely difficult to handle due to my sweaty palms and forehead and my shaking hands - very embarrassing!) I finally accepted a job as secretary to a high powered, totally spasmodic Harvard Business School professor. I started working for him in June '95. This guy was a textbook "Type A" personality. He would literally stand over my shoulder and watch me type on the computer while he waited for his work to be done. I started making terrible mistakes and just couldn't concentrate on my work. My hands would shake like crazy. A few times I would feel so overwhelmed that I would have to run to the ladies' room to cry hysterically and it would take all my strength to return to my desk. During this time I would feel heart palpitations and have terrible anxiety attacks. Again, I attributed it to stress. One morning I got into work and my heart was pounding so hard that I could actually see my chest heaving through my sweater. I thought I was having a heart attack. I went to the doctor in work and was told that I was in atrial fibrillation. My heart rate was 202 bpm! They rushed me to the hospital where I went through all kinds of tests over the next 3 days. That was in Sept. '95 and that's when I was diagnosed with Graves' disease. My Endo told me right from the beginning that I should have RAI done, but I decided I would try PTU for a year, because my sister-in-law had Graves' disease a few years earlier and had gone into remission after 6 months of PTU. I wasn't so lucky. After yo-yoing up and down constantly during that year I decided that I couldn't stand the symptoms any longer. I had RAI done on October 2nd, 1996. In January I thought that I might be going hypo. I was starting to feel really tired and my joints started aching. I would fall asleep on the couch watching TV at around 9 p.m. So I called my Endo and he told me to go off the PTU. Within a week I started getting real jittery and the heart palps started coming back. I was hyper again. I'm back on 4 PTU/day (right where I started almost 2 years ago) and sometimes I get really discouraged. The PTU does keep some of the Graves' symptoms at bay - the tremors have gone down dramatically, as well as the heart palps and diarrhea. But I feel like I have some hypo symptoms as well - every joint in my body is throbbing! Some days I feel hyper, and some days I feel exhausted.
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