The writer wanted to blame her body changes on a condition that could be fixed with a pill. Sound familiar?
When I first noticed that I had a lot less hair (on my head) than I used to, and more hair (on my face) than I used to, I began doing what doctors hate when patients do: I Googled my symptoms. The condition that kept coming up was hypothyroidism, which is when your thyroid, that little butterfly shaped gland in your neck, doesn’t crank out enough of the two big thyroid hormones, which in turn has a cascade effect on a bunch of other hormones and systems in your body and causes you to turn into a man. Well, not really, but the symptoms are unpleasant (unexplained weight gain, fatigue, and depression, to name a few) and if left untreated can lead to heart disease, infertility and a few other lovely things that no one wants.Rationally, of course, I don’t want to be sick. An underproductive gland cannot be a good thing. But I’m embarrassed to admit that there was a small part of me that was perversely hopeful that I did, in fact, have an underactive thyroid. The simple reason? Because if I did, it would mean that I am not simply fatter, more sluggish and hairier than I was when I was younger, but suffering from a common, under-diagnosed medical condition that can be rectified by simply taking a pill. Poof! I’m not old, fat, grumpy and furry! I’m young and fabulous, if ever-so-slightly imbalanced.
As sick as it sounds, a small part of me would have preferred to pay some huge pharmaceutical company buckets of money over the course of my lifetime through a bloated, mismanaged healthcare system that is taxing the big steaming pile of dog poop that we call the American economy for a synthetic thyroid hormone replacement (which may over time cause bone loss,) rather than accept that my body is changing, that a certain amount of change is part of life, and that the best course of action may simply be to ramp up my efforts to take care of my body so I don’t put on too much weight, get too blue or grow a full beard.
