Glasses and Thyroid Hormone
Hey remember that time I got laser eye surgery? Apparently my eyes didn’t get the memo that the good vision was supposed to last a lifetime. When I went for an eye exam about a year and a half ago, I mentioned to my eye doctor that I found it hard to read street signs around dusk and she confirmed that my vision wasn’t quite as good as it had been at my previous exam. But more recently I’ve been finding it challenging to read things street signs and other things in the distance and when I went to the eye doctor yesterday she confirmed that my vision has deteriorated a bit. It’s sort of on the cusp of do I need to get my surgery redone – I can use some glasses for driving, but don’t really need to wear them all the time. So I decided to just get myself a pair of glasses for now (which my health benefits will pay for) and see how much it bugs me to have to wear them.
In other health news, apparently I have hypothyroidism now. I wasn’t experiencing any symptoms or anything, but a blood test found that I had a high level of thyroid stimulating hormone (TSH), which basically means that my body isn’t producing enough thyroid hormone (and thus my body keeps making more TSH to try to stimulate my thyroid to make more thyroid hormone). So now I have to take a thyroid hormone pill once a day.
Well, I say that I didn’t have any symptoms of hypothyroidism but I should say that any of the symptoms of hypothyroidism that I have are probably not due to hypothyroidism, as they are things that I’ve had for a very long time, including when I had a normal TSH level on a previous blood test a year and a half ago. Things like fatigue (I mean, who isn’t tired all the time, right?), increased sensitive to cold (I have always hated being cold), weight gain (ummm, pandemic?), puffy face (umm, pandemic-induced weight gain anyone?), muscles aches (I only have those that result from weight lifting!), and impaired memory (my terrible memory is a long standing issue!).
As far as health problems go, hypothyroidism is not really that bad. I take a pill every day and that’s it. And, as I’ve discovered from talking to people, it’s really quite common! The worst part is that you can’t have any dairy for 4 hours before and 4 hours after you take the pill because calcium interferes with the absorption of thyroid hormone. When I was told that, I thought “no big deal! I don’t consume that much dairy – other than milk in my tea, which I typically drink at night, and cheese, but I don’t eat a tonne of cheese. But you know how when you can’t have something, it’s the only thing you want? I’m totally experiencing that. I decided to take my pill at 2 pm every day. That way I can have dairy at breakfast (sometimes I have oatmeal with milk or cottage cheese with fruit) as long as I have it before 10 am, and then I can have cheese at dinner as long as I have it after 6 pm. No dairy at lunch, but I don’t really eat much dairy at lunch. Except, I realized, when I have something with cheese for dinner that I want to have as leftovers for lunch! I typically just drink black coffee, but now that I’m taking my thyroid hormone at 2 pm, every afternoon I want a latte!
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Tags: glasses, health, hypothyroidism, thyroid hormone, vision