Nice Catch, Dr. Google!
A couple weeks ago, I went in for my not-quite annual wellness exam. I told my doc I was feeling pretty good, aside from the usual intermittent stuff--migraines, fatigue, etc. I went in to the appointment with a list of things to talk about, and we finally got to the last item: my thumbnails. I'm not sure when I first noticed it, but both of my thumbnails have been bumpy for awhile. I told her that it wasn't anything I was particularly worried about, but wondered what was happening in my body to make both thumbnails bumpy. She noted that I pick at my cuticles and said that that can lead to infection and irregular nail growth. I said that I'd been picking at my cuticles for several decades and had never seen bilateral weirdness with my nails.
At that point she turned to her computer and said, "As a patient, I don't know how you feel about Google, but let's see if we can find anything." I laughed and said, "Well, as a librarian, it's my starting point for a lot of research, so let's give it a go." I think her initial search was something like ridges thumbnails which pretty quickly brought up the term "washboard thumbnails," also known as "transverse ridging of the thumbnails." I gave her some search tips, like taking away quotations marks, and pretty soon, we kept seeing results that had the words thyroid and hypothyroid in them. Ah ha! I have a diagnosis of chronic fatigue/fibrymyalgia, so wouldn't ever think to overly complain about brain fog, fatigue, headache, etc, since it's stuff that comes and goes. But, there's a huge amount of overlap between hypothroidism, chronic fatigue and perimenopause (another thing we've assumed was going on). Given the addition of the bumpy thumbnails, the doc decided to test my thyroid levels.
Last week, while sitting in the hotel lobby at Computers in Libraries, wondering why I was feeling so absolutely crappy when I hadn't been up til 3 am doing karaoke, I got a call from my doctor's nurse. She was telling me all the stuff that came back okay, and I kept thinking, "something didn't come back okay or she wouldn't have called me to say that stuff was okay." Finally, she said that my thyroid test had indicated that I have clinical hypothryoidism and that the doctor wanted to start me on Synthroid.
Jeeze, that sucks, I thought. But after a few minutes, I was pretty happy about it because it explained so much. Admittedly, I am older than most of my CiL peers, and past my partying prime. Excited as I was to be at CiL and as much as I was enjoying it, I felt really out of sorts. I really pushed myself to participate, socially, as much as I did, and was wiped out for much of the conference. It seemed out of proportion the other factors--age, amount of sleep, etc. I was also getting bummed out by my lack of motivation to be more professionally active, compared to my peer group. Intellecually, I want to be in the game. I want to be writing, presenting, creating. My friend Matt always asks me "what are you working on," when we haven't talked for awhile. For the past several months my response has been, "uh....nothing." Inevitably, we talk about projects we could work on together, but the conversations have never gone past that.
Everything makes sense now, or at least I hope it does, as I'm feeling pretty relieved to know that there's a reason behind my lack of energy and engagement. There was a prescription for levoxothyrine waiting for me when I got home, and I fired up Doctors. Google and Ebscohost to learn what I could. The downside is that it could take several months for me to start feeling better, depending on how long it takes for the medicine to get my thyroid levels back to normal. The upside is that I can stop beating up on myself for not doing more more more. I'm going to cut myself some slack, say "no" without feeling guilty, and give myself time to heal and feel better. And, yes, I already have a follow-up appt scheduled with my doctor, the real one, to supplement what I've learned about online. I'm most grateful for Dr. Google, though, as I'm not sure I would even know that I had a problem if it weren't for such immediate availability of information.
