Diagnosticism

Almost three years ago (really? yes) Margaret was diagnosed with an acute case of Grave’s Disease. At the time, her endocrinologist said something to the effect that she’d only seen three living people with thyroid as active as Margaret’s, and it took some pretty brutal drug therapy to pound her thyroid into relative docility.

Then last December, she and her endocrinologist decided to nuke the thyroid, I spent a few nights on the day bed downstairs, and we hoped that her soon-to-be-ex-thyroid would wither away and leave her alone. Unfortunately, in a relatively unsurprising development, the radioactivity kicked her thyroid into even higher activity — she tripled the dosage of her thyroid suppression drugs after the iodine treatment. She kept going back for her monthly blood test, and the text kept indicating that her evil-genius thyroid gland was still determined to take over the world, beginning with Margaret.

Yesterday afternoon (on a weekend!), Margaret’s endocrinologist’s office called to say that her latest blood test showed her thyroid hormone levels plunging, and that she had to cut her meds way back — and when she comes back in a couple of weeks, she’ll be tested again to see whether she’s got any thyroid activity at all. It’s been a long, exhausting struggle for her, but it looks as though she may have defeated SuperThyroid.