Life With Jenny: Type 1 Diabetes, Thyroid Disease, & Surgery

I recovered pretty well from the C section surgery, Steven was back in Iraq, the girls were doing well. Erica started sleeping through the night at 8 weeks old! That was such a blessing because this momma got to sleep! When Erica was about 10 weeks old, I noticed that I had been feeling extremely tired even though I was getting pretty decent sleep. Maybe not a solid 8 hours every night, but when I did sleep, it was good sleep, so feeling so tired just didn't make sense to me. I decided to make a doctors appointment to see if there was something going on I needed to be concerned about.

I went to the appointment, explained my symptoms and family history. Had some blood work done and the results were not what I was expecting. My thyroid gland was not functioning properly - it was overactive. I thought this was weird considering my mom has underactive thyroid. Why did mine go the opposite way? The blood work also showed that my liver function was out of whack as well. The doctor said "your LFTs are elevated." Huh? To explain this, he said that this means there was something that was causing damage to my liver cells. He named all kinds of things it could be, like hepatitis, which I was like but how? He said usually he only sees these kinds of results from people who drink alcohol in excess which has damaged their liver. I didn't drink. He said we'd have to do more testing to figure out what was going on there. He did say that the thyroid issue and the liver issue were the most likely culprits of my exhaustion.

So, he started me on Iodine for my thyroid. The idea was to slow it down since it was going bananas. I got an appointment scheduled for an ultrasound of my liver to see if there was anything that could be detected. I took the Iodine as directed and waited a week until my ultrasound appointment. I did my best not to worry, but that was hard. I was on my own with 2 small children and my husband was in Iraq, in a war zone. Yeah, I'll work on that whole not worrying thing! I was scared though. What if there was something seriously wrong with me? What if I had some kind of cancer? What if whatever was wrong with me was something I wouldn't survive? I had so many thoughts like this until I got answers. It was a really hard time for me because I needed to be strong, because at that time with Steven away, I was all our girls had. Mommy couldn't be sick or hurt. Mommy had to be strong.

After starting the Iodine, I did start to notice I didn't want to fall asleep while driving anymore, so that was good. I still felt very exhausted though. I just told myself it was whatever was going on with my liver and to try not to worry about it. When my ultrasound appointment finally arrived, I was nervous. The technician who did my ultrasound took lots of pictures but didn't tell me anything. Didn't tell me if she could see anything, nothing. So I had to wait again. A few days went by and the house phone at my mom's rang. Looking surprised she answered it. Then her face turned white and she asked the person on the other end to hang on. She handed me the receiver and said "this woman on the phone is saying that your gallbladder is full of gallstones and you need to have surgery." Huh? I took the phone and spoke to the receptionist. She said they called my emergency contact because they couldn't get ahold of me. I was annoyed by that because I hadn't missed any calls. Long story short, she misdialed my number. Anyways, she did indeed say that my gallbladder was full of gallstones and that I needed to get scheduled for surgery to have my gallbladder taken out.

I had so many questions. I asked if I could come in to speak with the doctor and ask questions because this was a lot to take in. I got an appointment scheduled the next day to talk about the findings. I just wanted to know what this meant, if I was going to be okay, what the surgery would entail, would I be able to take care of the girls, why was this happening to me, did I do something to cause this? All of my questions were answered. I was going to be fine. I didn't do anything to cause this, I was going to need some help after surgery to take care of the girls while I recovered, surgery would be laparoscopic. Now unfortunately, I had to wait about a month and a half to be able to get the surgery scheduled. It was a military hospital and something about being short staffed and my surgeon had to leave for something...I can't remember. Surgery was scheduled for December 2007.

During the month and a half of waiting, I started developing other symptoms related to the gallstones - mainly sharp pains on my right side, which were referred to as "gallbladder attacks". They were pretty intense pains and I was certainly not a fan. After about 4 weeks on the iodine for my thyroid (and still not feeling well) we did more blood work and determined that now my thyroid had done a 180 and went the other way - now I was underactive. Unfortunately, the iodine killed my thyroid, a little bit. So now I needed to start on Synthroid to replace the hormone that my thyroid wasn't making enough of. I was SO FRUSTRATED!! I was exhausted. I felt lonely. My body seemed to be betraying me at every turn. Constantly hearing about war related things in Iraq and wondering if my husband was alive was more stress than I think most people can handle, never mind all the other things I had going on too! But, despite everything, I tried to be okay. I tried to say I was fine so that nobody would worry about me. I tried to handle as much as I could on my own. I felt like it was what I was supposed to do.

After what felt like a very long time, the day for surgery arrived. My mother in law had gotten one of the church members to take care of the girls for me at the house while I was having surgery and then to come by each day for about 4 weeks to help me out around the house with the kids. Since I was having surgery on a military installation, I needed someone with post access to be able to chauffer me to the hospital and back home, a friend made herself available that day. She took me to surgery, stayed there until they released me, she even helped me get dressed to leave, she and I aren't friends anymore but I am grateful for her kindness during that time. The surgery went well, the gallbladder definitely needed to come out! I was going to be sore for a while and couldn't lift anything over 5 pounds for a few weeks - which meant I couldn't lift my babies. That hurt my heart.

Recovery went well, physically. Emotionally, it sucked. I hated that I couldn't take care of my babies, I couldn't lift them on my own, I couldn't play with them like I always had. It was hard to put myself first so I could get better so I could take care of them. But, the few weeks passed and I was feeling better. Had my post op check up and all looked good. Blood work came back great (for the liver) and I was given a clean bill of health, from that doctor. I was still dealing with my thyroid issues though. The low dose of Synthroid, wasn't enough so we had to bump it up a little bit. It took some time, but that finally seemed to work and I had stable numbers for a while. BUT, I had to be careful because my diabetes could affect my thyroid and my thyroid could affect my diabetes. Oh good. Thank you for that. That's just what I needed. Ugh. I just wanted to be healthy. I wanted this dang deployment to be over and for my husband to come home!

Steven returned home from the Iraq deployment in May of 2008. Looking back on this time in my life, I can see there is so much that I didn't process, I just kept going because I felt like I had to. I felt like I had no choice. But, I had gone through a lot. The birth of Ryann was traumatic, after her birth I developed an eating disorder that I legitimately didn't know I had until a couple weeks ago when I started writing about it. I hadn't planned to write about it, it just came up as I was writing that weeks blog. I'm glad it did though, and I'm glad I have recognized that I did and still do have an eating disorder. We see movies or TV shows about eating disorders and we're just like oh wow, that's so sad...but we don't realize just how very real the conditions are. They happen to so many of us and we don't talk about it. I can only imagine the amount of people who have read my blog that know me and were probably shocked to find that information out about me, because I never talked about it. My husband didn't even know about it until I told him a couple weeks ago after it came out in my writing. It's easy to hide things and pretend it's not a big deal. It's easy to tell yourself that you don't have a problem because you don't meet all of the specific criteria of said condition. I went through a lot with the birth of Erica and after she was born too, all while Steven was deployed - to WAR. I know I'm not the first wife to ever go through these things, I'm not saying I'm a special case, but we don't talk about these things. Going through all of these things alone was terrifying and I wish I hadn't gone through it alone. I also realize there was a reason God had me go through those things. I believe it was because He knew it would lead me here, to this very day, writing these very things. Not being afraid to tell people that I went through hard things and I'm not perfect and it's completely fine that I'm not always okay.

Let's stop silencing ourselves. We need to talk about the things that have happened to us because the things that happened to us are what shaped up into who we are today. We all have a story, or multiple stories, and we should embrace sharing our experiences with each other. We should be building each other up, not tearing each other down. I am so thankful I am at a place in my life, thanks to the Lord, to talk about these things so that others know they aren't the only ones going through it.

Thank you for being here! Stay tuned for a special Christmas blog post this weekend and then Tuesday I'll be back talking about more hard things like type 1 diabetes, thyroid disease, my husband's second deployment to Afghanistan, anxiety, depression, self harm, moving to Alaska and so much more!

Merry Christmas!

xoxo - Jenny