Friday Visit with new Endocrinologist.
I haven't been thrilled with the ones I've gone to before now. SO I was hoping this would be better.
Dr Burr was personable and funny and spent nearly an hour with me.
Looking at my old labs he said that my antibody lab was negative for Graves. I swear that is what they said I had!
I was positive for Hashimoto's antibodies though, and I think Dr Segu probably told me that, as he was the one that ordered that lab, but I don't really remember.
So he says I have Hashimotos hashitoxicosis and possibly not Graves. He told me that 50% of people with Hashimotos antibodies (which is apparently quite common) never have any thyroid symptoms, but that the 50% who do, over 5-20 years, eventually end up hypo.
He said I had a bit of lid lag and eye protrusion. I thought eye involvement was just Graves, but I didn't think to ask him that.
He also did an ultrasound of my thyroid, which I'd never had done before. He said that it did look like Hashimoto's and a bit like Graves with increased blood flow. I also have a very small nodule on one side that I should have looked at every year.
The blood tests will tell us if I have Graves now or not. He also ordered the TPO, primarily so that if it is high enough, I can qualify for the biolynk pay-for-your-blood program. And vitamin D, because he says we are quite low in Utah generally.
He said that Hashimoto's is not dangerous, but can drive you crazy as you fluctuate back and forth from hyper to hypo. Since I have fluctuated in the past, I probably will continue to do so, and it is very likely that previous "depressed" times were because I was hypo. He said that many people get tired of the back and forth and decide to do something permanent.
When he mentioned the "permanent" treatments, RAI was NOT the first of the list. He also included surgery and block and replace as one of the options or putting the thyroid to sleep with ATDs and giving replacement hormone as one of the options for Hashi's.
Other things that he mentioned that I was encouraged by. He's seen people take ATD for years, 22 being the longest. He said that you can use the antibodies in Graves to see if you are in remission, instead of the old way of just tapering off the drugs and seeing if you go hyper or not. These are things I knew, but I have never had a doctor tell me before.
I also liked that he kept asking if I had any more questions for him.
He did order a TT3 instead of a FT3, which I would have
preferred, but I didn't notice when I could have asked him about it.
Hopefully he is as willing to support whichever treatment I want as he
sounded in this visit. He did say we should wait and see what the labs are right now before we do anything more than the betablocker, which he told me to take 1/2 tablet more of and more during the day to reduce the symptoms in the meantime.
Since he considered Eagle Mountain "a million miles" away he said that we will do most of this over the phone, such lab results and dosage adjustments. Since the time I was gone, including traffic was 4 hours, that is probably a good thing.
He also prescribed the medicines 3 times a day, just so that I would have 3 times as much on hand (and it's cheaper that way)
So I am encouraged and relieved. I don't have what I thought I did, and I didn't have to fight the doctor, at least not yet.
Yippee!
2 comments:
Good luck with your labs. And by that I mean, I hope you are sick enough that people want to pay money for your blood! It is a funny thing to wish someone, but really, money does make it just a bit more worthwhile, wouldn't you say?
I tried to get them to pay me for my blood, but my RA levels were way too low. They like the levels to be off the charts high, which is really rare. Too bad!!
Here's hoping that my levels are sky high, though the doc did say it depends on the assay. The email I got from them didn't acknowledge that variable.
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