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Graves' Disease Resource Page
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VAL'S STORY Hi! My name is Valerie and I have Graves' Disease. I am a 51 year old single mom with two absolutely fantastic sons. Right now, I am 5'3" tall and weigh 130 pounds. In June of 1996, I was 5'3" tall and weighed 218 pounds! I looked and felt like hell! Let me backtrack some. Since I now know what the symptoms of Graves' Disease are, I believe that I may have had Graves' Disease, or some form of thyroid disease, since sometime around February 1976. My youngest son was 5 months old at the time (the other was only 19 months!) and I had gone into the hospital for a hysterectomy. Approximately 6 hours after my surgery, I had a bleeder come untied and was hemorrhaging severely. During my second surgery, I had bled out enough that I received 15 units of whole blood and 3 units of packed cells! I remember nothing for the next 4 days. I was in a coma and was in intensive care. I was told that nothing seemed to rouse me from this coma. Then, my ex-husband told me through the fog that he was going to call my sister up to help with the children! Apparently this got through to me because I came out of my coma within several hours. Don't get me wrong, I love my only sister dearly, but at the time, she was a 21 year old ditz that I wouldn't have wanted to take care of my dog! I spent the next few days in the hospital, and 12 days post-op, I was home alone with these two babies. Maybe I should talk to Steven Speilberg about this horror story! At any rate, I muddle through and muddled through all the tragedies of the next several years. My mother passed away and I was devastated. Then, four years later, my father remarried and I adored Earline. She was the step mother I would have picked if I had anything to say about it. During this interim, I had divorced and remarried. Right after my father remarried, my father in law passed away. Then, my aunts and uncles started passing away. By December 1984, I was living as a single mom as I had separated from Bill and my father and step mother both ended up in the hospital, she for open heart surgery and he for a stroke. Due to some miscommunication with some people who should never have been listened to, they both ended up on a respirator. This is just before Christmas, I have a 9 year old and an 8 year old and no family to help me. I will find out later that my sister and my husband were having an affair and that is why I could never find either of them. My brother had shut himself off from the world when my Mom died and was no help either. During all of this, I am gaining weight, then losing weight, my heart would race up to 200 beats a minute for what seemed to me like no reason whatsoever. Let me state this emphatically: I am no heroine or anything special. I was a Mom with kids who meant everything to her and I did what I had to do to get by. I would get the shakes and drop and break things and my kids would joke about it. In January of 1984, my step mother passed away on January 8 and my father passed away on January 16. I made a flying trip to Texas with a 9 year old and an 8 year old, in the middle of the winter in a Toyota Tercel! That trip is another story unto itself! I buried my father. I walked away with an empty heart, the flag from his coffin (he had been a career military officer) and a sense of malaise that I couldn't shake. I continued to have incidents of rapid heart beat, sweats, shaking so that I dropped things, but I chalked them up to depression over my father's death and the fact that in 1978, I had been diagnosed with mitral valve prolapse. I divorced in 1985 and 3 weeks after my divorce, my sister and my ex husband married. I was truly devastated this time. it took me years to get over that. My sister and I are friends once again. There is only my brother and sister and I left, and I didn't want to go to my grave not speaking to her. She has severe MS and I just admit that Bill takes really good care of her. I spent the next years, up until 1996, being treated like a "whacko" who just needed psychiatry and drugs! I didn't function well at all. I would seem to come out of my fog to do things for my sons, but that was all. By this point, I had moved to Helena MT and was living near my foster sister Patti and her family. For the first time in years, I had a support system. But, I still had a doctor who said everything was all in my head. For reasons that I won't go into, I attempted suicide in 1995. I still continued to be treated with disdain by my doctor like he couldn't be bothered with my complaints. I finally got fed up and changed doctors, starting to see my present doctor, who was his partner. Finally! Someone who would listen. When I started losing this weight that I had gained, he sat up and took notice. The day that we admitted Patti's father in law to the hospital, Dr. Weitz was there. When we were leaving, he looked at me and said "let me see your throat" and when he did (this was a Saturday) he told me to be in his office at 8 am Monday morning. His exact words were "I think you have Graves' Disease, but I want to confirm it with a bloodtest." Finally, after all those years of suffering, perhaps needlessly, someone was listening to me! My blood tests confirmed Graves' (my Free T4 was 7.4 and my TSH was so low as to be unreadable). He put me on PTU, but it did not work for me. Did nothing for the symptoms. He did a Thyroid Uptake and Scan and my levels confirmed that I needed something else to help me. My 4 hour uptake was 78.46% and my 24-hour uptake was 96%! I opted for RAI as I was beyond my childbearing years and had already had a hysterectomy. My Rai was done on September 6, 1997, and I am beginning to feel results, although my levels are not such that I can go on any sort of medication. I do not have the sweats any longer. As a matter of fact, I am freezing most of the time! I don't shake as much, although this is still a problem. I am one of the lucky ones, I guess, because I don't seem to have any eye involvement other than crusty junk in my eyes in the mornings when I wake up.
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