Almost 2 years ago.

I heard for so long that I didn't look healthy, I looked tired, I was gaining weight, I was forgetting things, but I just thought I was out of shape. Well I was out of shape, but not in the traditional sense of the phrase. I was just plain sick. Here is what happened nearly two years ago.

Two years ago I was diagnosed with Hashimoto's Disease or Hypothyroidism. Basically, my body was attacking my Thyroid Gland thinking it was some foreign object in my body. My body was slowly shutting down due to lack of thyroid and I was slowly dying, or at least it seemed that way. My metabolism was gone. Here is a list of symptoms associated with this disease, I had ALL of them.

1. Increased sensitivity to cold


2. Constipation (TMI...sorry)


3. Pale, dry skin


4. A puffy face


5. Hoarse voice


6. An elevated blood cholesterol level


7. Unexplained weight gain — occurring infrequently and rarely more than 10 to 20 pounds, most of which is fluid


8. Muscle aches, tenderness and stiffness, especially in your shoulders and hips


9. Pain and stiffness in your joints and swelling in your knees or the small joints in your hands and feet


10. Muscle weakness, especially in your lower extremities


11. Depression

Here is a picture of me just before diagnosis. (JT is sooo cute)

I honestly don't know how long ago that my thyroid started to die but looking back at old pictures I see big changes around the time Fisher was born. I sometimes wonder if the trauma around that event, the greatest stress I have ever known, had an adverse effect on my body. God will let me know some day. :-)

Anyways, my doctor told me that my low levels of Thyroid hormone were so low they were off the chart. I was the worst case he had seen. Thanks Doc, I already feel better. :-) But what he told me was that because it was treatable, with a simple synthetic thyroid pill for the rest of my life, that I was going to start feeling better in short order. I was going to get my life back. I started to cry in the room on the spot.

In between the time I first had blood drawn and my diagnosis of low thyroid, I was sent to get a sleep study done. I was diagnosed with Sleep Apnea . I spent the night in a hospital room hooked to a dozen wires and was basically told that I was stopping breathing an average of 60-80 times per hour. So, my body would begin to relax, fall asleep, and my airway would close and my body would twitch, to wake me up (although I didn't fully become conscious), to open the airway to get a breath. Found this cool drawing below for visual aid.

I was never conscious of the fact that my body was doing this. That's the scary part. I thought I was sleeping. Kelly had woke me many times to tell me to breath because I had stopped. I just figured I was snoring. Because my body never really went into deep sleep, REM sleep, I was getting about 10 minutes of sleep per hour, and that was cumulative throughout the hour, not even 10 minutes in a row. The doctor's made me take a sleeping machine home right away and required me to wear it moving forward, they feared if I didn't start sleeping with it right away that I could die in my sleep. It was that bad.

It took some time to catch up on sleep after not sleeping for years. My life has changed in the last two years since going to the docs and getting help. I had become nearly comatose. Sleepy during the day and not interacting with my family. I could do nothing. All my energy was used trying to maintain my job and by the time I got home I was not able to function. Not much help to a wife and three kids. So needless to say my wife, kids, and I are happy campers now.

I have to maintain my thyroid levels with medication and go to the doctor to have them checked whenever I feel more tired than usual. I haven't been able to shed all the weight since my diagnosis two years ago but I'll hang on to the weight for the "new" life I now have.

I guess I have a couple words of advice, so here goes: Never wait to go see a doctor when you think something may be wrong with you, mentally or physically. And if others are telling you they think something is wrong, you are already behind the eight ball. GO GET HELP.

Here I am with my family now.

Thank you God for developing medical treatments for folks like me. You have given me my life back.