Читать книгу The Healthy Thyroid: What you can do to prevent and alleviate thyroid imbalance - Patsy Westcott - Страница 41

These physical symptoms are compounded by an almost overwhelming exhaustion, as Maggie, who developed an underactive thyroid after the birth of her first child, relates:

I felt totally paralysed for three days. I was so weak I could barely walk around. That slowly improved, but I still felt slow – the way I imagine an old person must feel. I had no appetite, but even so, the weight piled on. On one occasion, I was actually vomiting for three days and I still put on a pound! I was freezing cold all the time and had to keep the heating turned up high. My face was puffy; I looked as though I had been crying. My head felt as if it was full of cottonwool. I couldn’t focus properly – if I looked at the TV and then tried to look at a newspaper, everything was blurred. I had noises in my ears. I slept very badly. I had pain and tingling in my hands that woke me up. I was also suffering from terrible constipation. I started losing my hair, but I just thought that was the normal hair loss that happens after pregnancy, but what was strange was that I didn’t have to shave my legs or pluck my eyebrows. I felt as if my whole appearance was changing. The smallest task seemed enormous – I had trouble just walking to the corner of the road. Things came to a head when we went for a walk with some friends we were visiting. I was dragging myself along at my usual snail’s pace, several yards behind. Being unable to keep up with the others really brought it home to me that it was more than just the after-effects of having a baby. Something was seriously wrong.

June said, ‘I thought everyone else was going too fast. I didn’t realise it was me that was slow.’

In some cases, the tiredness associated with an underactive thyroid is so troublesome that a number of doctors believe that ME/CFS (myalgic encephalomyopathy/chronic fatigue syndrome) and fibromyalgia (pain in the soft tissue and muscles accompanied by exhaustion) may be a result of undiagnosed hypothyroidism. In the absence of hard evidence from studies, there is much debate over this issue. In the US, Dr John Lowe, an expert in fibromyalgia, believes there is a clear link between the two conditions (Clinical Bulletin of Myofascial Therapy, 1997; see also www.thyroid.about.com). In the UK, Dr Charles Shepherd has found that hyper- and hypothyroid problems are associated with ME/CFS. Most conventional doctors tend to pooh-pooh the idea, but many current texts on the thyroid, especially those coming from America, consider the idea to have merit.