I went to Dr. Thomas at the Capitol Hill medical clinic on Wednesday afternoon after waiting for two and a half weeks for my appointment. She was the only doctor who was even able to see me; other clinics in my area (I wanted to be able to walk to the doctor's office) were booked until September. And it's not as though my condition were life-threatening. I was just concerned about the hair loss, and the sluggishness was increasing, even though the hours of sleep I got each night were also going up. I wanted to know what was wrong, especially before the semester begins (and preparation for my comprehensive exams continues) in just a few days.
So Wednesday at 2:30 pm finally came and I rode my bike the four blocks over to the clinic. It is a comically old building, so old that I was taken a bit aback at first. If the building looked like it was going to fall apart, what kind of medical treatment was I going to receive? But whatever, it was next to a hospital (the Speciality Hospital of Washington), and Dr. Thomas got good reviews online (like that means anything) and I was desperate to see a professional, so I went in.
I walked up rickety old steps to the second floor, passing signs that read things like "Do NOT sit on top of the heater - the cover is broken!" and "DON'T BLOCK THE STEPS" and walked down a Pepto Bismol pink hallway that had a few framed prints by Renoir and Monet. I looked at the one by Renoir, "Two Young Girls at a Piano," for a second before I walked into Dr. Thomas's office. It looked peaceful. I thought, this is what life was like before modernism, or at least postmodernism. When French men could paint scenes like this and become famous. How weird.
A woman behind the desk photocopied my driver's license and insurance ID and gave me a stack of papers, all of which looked like they were typed up by a typewriter in 1989 and photocopied endlessly since, for me to fill out in the waiting room. I sat down on an old chair and began to fill in my name, lucky that I brought my own pen since the receptionist was out, and looked around. I was with three other people: a large woman who listened to her iPod so loudly I could hear the dance/hip hop she was playing, and an older woman and her teenage son. The son had long dreads and looked horribly uncomfortable. His mother ate a bag of hot fries, those spicy little potato stick things, and looked unconcerned. On the TV was an afternoon news show with a vaguely attracted middle-aged man and woman bantering excitedly about nothing, all of which was the stupidest thing I had ever heard. There were a few magazines scattered around on low coffee tables shoved into the corners. No one read them. They either watched TV or listened to the iPod, or listened to the other woman's iPod, as I did. Which I didn't really enjoy.
The paperwork asked for my history, my insurance, the start date of my last period, why I was in there, etc etc etc. Other information requested included my family history of medical defects, which I abbreviated to include only the most serious. I noted the heart problems, cancer, and thyroid issues in the rest of my family, citing members who had already died of these diseases. And I wrote in on 'other' that my aunt has full-body alopecia. which is what I feared that I had when my hair started falling out rapidly and with a seeming vengeance a few months ago.
That was the real reason I was here, after all: the hair loss. Online sources say that female hair loss is more of a pride thing than anything else. It hurts our femininity, and that makes us sad. I was reticent to agree, laughing at these online generalization of womanhood, but agreed anyway, even though I wouldn't allow myself to believe that I did. Losing my hair - my fine, pathetic hair that doesn't grow and I don't know how to style and it always looks terrible - would hurt me very badly. Maybe it's a pride thing after all, and maybe I'm more of a traditional female than I thought. To participate in making sweeping generalizations about gender and sex, if I lost my hair, I would feel pretty terrible. It would be hard for me to leave the apartment. For a man, and particularly for an older man, it's part of life, part of genetics. For a woman it was embarrassing, like I had done something wrong. Had I? I thought about photos I had seen of myself from my trip to Colorado in July: I was armwrestling with a friend (it's a long story) and someone took a photo of me winning, of me taking her down, and my whole body is leaning towards the camera, the top of my head visible. And the hair is thinning to an embarrassingly noticeable degree. I was starting to go bald. Since most people are taller than me, I began to wonder why no one said anything. Maybe they were embarrassed about it too.
But, I joked to myself, I always looked good in wigs. And wigs you don't really need to style, the way you need to do hair every day. I could deal with it if my hair all fell out at once and I could just go to the wig store, pick one out, and go home. The next day, I'd look like a hair model. A plastic hair model.
Rather than just accept this fate, however, I tried to figure out what I could do on my own. It was my hair stylist, Molly, who said that my thyroid might be the issue. She was cutting my hair in late July and was concerned with how easily it wrested away from my skull, how much was missing up top. It wasn't anemia, because I had been taking iron pills for a year or more now. It wasn't that my hair was unhealthy because I dyed it too much, even though it was before - the prolonged contact with Sun-In hadn't done my hair any favors. But I had given up hair dye, gone cold turkey, and I hadn't hanged its color in over a year. The hair that remained was soft and healthy and shiny (and the mousy blondish-brown that I had dyed away for so many years). But it fell out all the time. Frightening numbers of strands would come out in the shower. Every time I ran my hand through my hair, anywhere between five and twenty strands would be entangled in my fingers. I hated it. I tried not to touch it, thinking that if I just left my hair alone, it would stop falling out. I brushed it once a day and that was it. I thought to myself, if you leave it alone, everything will be fine.
Well, what a load of crap. Leaving my hair alone didn't help anything. It was self-deception, my way of coping with something I was scared of, and I was scared. I was really scared of going bald.
Instead, when I decided to actually be proactive about some things, I made my appointment with Dr. Thomas and looked around online to see what I could do in the meantime. I noted that a lack of iodine in the diet has negative effects on the thyroid and could be the cause of some hair loss. I realized that my diet was about 100% iodine deficient. Our salt wasn't iodized. My multivitamin, that I took daily, had no iodine. And I rarely ate fish or seaweed because there is a shocking lack of sushi restaurants in Capitol Hill (why is this? We finally got a frozen yogurt place. Why no sushi?). So I bought iodized salt, added it in all the places I normally added salt, and started taking a multivitamin with 100% of my daily value of iodine. Within the week things started to improve: less hair came out when I washed it in the shower, fewer strands in the hairbrush, even fewer in my hands as I ran them, oh-so-tentatively at first, through my hair. Wow!, I thought to myself. This is fabulous! I have this whole thing taken care of!
Then I went to the doctor.
Sigh.
In Dr. Thomas's office, after I had filled out the paperwork I decided to go use the bathroom so I could take a few deep breaths by myself before I had to hear what devastating news the doctor might potentially have. I handed the clipboard to the receptionist and asked her where the bathroom was - down the hall, right next to the Renoir. At first I thought the door was a trick: no door knob, and I couldn't see any hinges. And it wouldn't open. It was stuck shut. I tried pushing it inwards, then pulling it to one side and the other thinking that the door was on rollers somehow. Nothing worked. I thought I had the wrong door, but the sign above it said "Restroom" and was definitely referring to the mystery door. Then, from inside the mystery door's room, I heard a toilet flush and someone wash turn on and off the sink. The door pulled inwards and out came the young guy with dreads. He had a little plastic cup of his urine in one hand, and was really embarrassed to see me standing there. We negotiated the tiny hallway and he went and sat down in a room to my left. I wondered what he had to pee in a cup for. It made me realize that other people's problems will always dwarf mine, and I suddenly became very embarrassed that I was at the doctor because I was feeling vain.
After I used the bathroom I sat back down in the waiting room. The iPod woman was called out. When I sneezed a few times, the older potato stick-eating woman said 'Bless you' and then turned back to the TV. I waited for about five more minutes when a Haitian woman took me into an examining room, took my blood pressure and pulse, and, as I turned my head so I wouldn't see, drained two vials of my blood. There was a photo of a sheltie on her wall, so while she was taking my blood we talked about dogs. Her sheltie was named Beethoven and she had a few prints by Van Gogh on her wall, around the picture of her dog. I thought, this is a very classically-oriented doctor's office. Wow.
The Haitian nurse asked me if I needed a pelvic exam, which I did not. I told her about the hair, and the tiredness, and she took me into a different examining room and told me I could wait there for the doctor. The room was made for pelvic exams, which always makes for an uncomfortable waiting period, staring at those stirrups. Dr. Thomas came in, checked my vitals again, had me breathe a few deep breaths, listened to my story about the hair loss and the tiredness and all the other things, felt my throat, and told me that she didn't see or feel or hear anything wrong. In fact, I was really healthy. She'd get the blood results back by Friday at the latest and call me if anything was wrong. I was supposed to keep taking the multivitamin with iodine. Things were probably okay.
So when she called me back less than 24 hours later, she at least noted that what I have is not severe. My hypothyroidism (underactive thyroid, the gland that controls metabolism) is mild or moderate. There are numbers involved - Dr. Thomas mentioned them on the phone - though I don't know what they corresponded too. A normal thyroid is between 1 and 4, preferably around 2 or 3. Mine is at 8. 8 what? I don't know. But 8 is bad. She got the results of my blood test back and wanted to get me on medication right away, a low dose of some hormone, and I was to stop taking the iodine immediately and get on these pills just as fast.
She also phoned the prescription into the CVS two blocks away for me, which was nice. She said that I had to take pills daily, a pill every day for eight weeks, and then come back and see her and "we'll see how we're doing." I like how doctors always use 'we' when talking about individual patient conditions. SHE doesn't have hypothyroidism (or does she?) so it's not OUR condition. But we'll still see how WE are doing in two months. It makes me feel like I'm part of a team.
I went back to the computer and looked up hypothyroidism. I thought it was funny that I have hyPOthyroidism, since I also have hypoglycemia. Everything is low with me. Once, when I was about 15, I went to the doctor because I was shaking all the time. I had eaten lunch with my father and sister and then I went to the doctor, who took some blood. He said that I had the blood sugar level of someone who had been fasting for at least four hours, but I had eaten half an hour beforehand. Everything is low with me.
Hypothyroidism is normally something that strikes older women, often in their 50s during menopause. Symptoms include unexplained weight gain, sluggishness, dry and brittle skin - and hair loss. I had none of these to any great extent, except for the hair loss. And I was tired all the time, but I blamed that on grad school and general stress. And even though I worked out every day, I hadn't lost weight in years, but I hadn't gained any either. My weight had been steady for a long time - a frustratingly long time, especially since I did want to lose weight. And my skin wasn't any more dry or brittle than anyone else's, or so I thought. And I'm 27!, I thought to myself. Why am I sick with a menopausal woman's disease?
But if it is indeed hypothyroidism, this explains a lot, and if I get this treated, it could potentially benefit me a lot, especially in this upcoming semester when I'll be preparing for comprehensive exams. I would love to be able to sleep less and still feel rested. I would love to go through the day without the stress of looking bald to anyone tall enough to see the top of my head (which is most people). These things would be a real load off my mind. Should they happen, I would welcome them.
I picked up the pills this morning. They're small and light purple in color and oblong in shape. I have to take them in the morning, on an empty stomach, at least half an hour to an hour before breakfast, and four hours from when I plan on taking an iron or calcium supplement. I can no longer take an iodine supplement because of the possibility of negative interactions, so I'll revert back to my old multivitamin. I'm going to keep using the salt though, just in case. I took the first one around 8:30 am.
So, about 12 hours after I took the first pill, I feel good. I didn't get the groggy sluggish I-need-a-nap feeling this afternoon, and that made me happy. But this was also just the first day, and I wonder how much of it is psychosomatic. I am easily swayed by the idea of taking medication - sugar pills work wonders for me - because I believe that as soon as I take something that a doctor prescribed to me, health and wellness are not too far away. I may be deceiving myself, but it's a good first day of deception. We'll see what happens from here. Hopefully the future is hirsute and bright.
No comments:
Post a Comment