GETTING HEALTHIER!

I want to take a moment to wish all the school children a very happy first day of school!  I am sure there are lots of tummy aches and pouty faces this morning, but once they get to school - all will be well!  Happy First Day of School to the Students, Teachers and Parents!

                                                                  . . .

So, next thing on the agenda is getting healthier!  Well I certainly have enough vegetables in the freezer to aid myself in eating a healthier diet - and we have been eating a lot healthier since moving to the country anyway - much less opportunity for eating out as regularly as we used to do.

Exercise - well here too - there is no end to the exercise I get here.  I walk everywhere I go, and I walk every day.  Where I used to sit in a chair in an office all day, now my daily work is much more physical.  Gardening and yard work can be exhausting if I let it be.  And I also have my care taking job at the library which gets me moving.  My new house has a studio located on the second floor - it's up and down that staircase a hundred times a day, some days... and on laundry days it's basement to second floor over and and over again... really good exercise.

Sadly, no matter how well intended we make our health, our bodies can and do work against us.

With all that exercise and healthy eating - I have been gaining weight steadily since we moved here.  And I have been tired, really really tired, which I attributed to going up and down those steps.  My doctor has been taking all the regular blood tests and found my thyroid to be low, so she has been increasing my dosage of medication  - but still no change.

So she decided to do a different thyroid test from the regular TSH.  It is a thyroid antibody test. The thyroid antibody when in extreme actually causes not only the thyroid to not work properly, but it also destroys the thyroid itself.  The condition is called Hashimoto's Disease.

The thyroid antibodies are supposed to be at 4.  Mine are 400.  But the good news is that I don't actually have Hashimoto's Disease even though my antibodies are indeed actually destroying my thyroid. My abnormal result are a result of 6 years of chemical chemo treatment for breast cancer.

Can you imagine my frame of mind when I am told this - particularly since all through my treatment I steadily gained weight - and openly complained about it to my physicians at the time?  I had lost 70 lbs  two years prior to getting breast cancer and had managed very easily to keep it off, until I started on Tamoxifen, and later Femera, for breast cancer treatment.

How come in all this time, no one has checked this antibody?  My new family doctor listened to my complaints and did something about it!

The treatment is simple - get the thyroid levels up to where they need to be to be normal, using medication, but it's going to take some time and I will have ups and downs along the way.

I have a long way to go, but at least the journey has begun, I feel like that in itself is  finally getting  me somewhere...

And already I am loosing weight...

So what's next now that I am getting healthy?