Killing My Thyroid to Live

Photo by Luiz Rogério Nunes on Unsplash

Surgically removing my thyroid was meant to save my life but it left me in worse state ever and it took two years to get my health back to some form of normality. What I learnt in those two years was invaluable and inexcusable in equal measures.

In October 2019, my gynaecologist picked up on my skewed thyroid numbers on a routine check up and refered me to an Endocronologist. I had been feeling a little lethargic and brain fogged lately and thought it must be something to do with menopause and dwindling hormones. I was otherwise a healthy 52 year old with no health issues.

But my thyroid numbers indicated I was super hyper-that is, my thyroid was overactive and spewing out hormones which symptomatically should mean faster heart rate, feeling anxious, jittery, weight loss….but I had none of the hyper symptoms, infact quite the opposite. My heart rate and blood pressure were on the low side. My Endo was perplexed, something did not add up so he referred me for more investigations.

What followed was a series of more and more probing and invasive tests and escalating red flags that indicated that my thyroid was most suspiciously malignant. I had multiple thyroid scans, two biopsies, an isotope imaging and they all pointed to a picture of a very angry, scarred thyroid that was out of control and out to destroy me.

Panic set in, naturally.

I was told the only safe option for me was to have my thyroid gland removed, and surgery was scheduled for January 2020.

This was the time when the world was just waking up to the virus in Wuhan, but for most of us it was still news of a faraway land. Lucky for me in January of 2020, hospitals were business as usual and all scheduled surgeries were hapenning. As we all would horrifyingly witness, a couple of months later all hell would break lose all over the world.

On 17th January 2020, my thyroid was surgically excised to save me.

As the surgeon took out the thyroid he noticed that it had a strange texture and felt hard like a piece of wood and he remarked to his…