DEAR THYROID^TM

Dear Thyroid,

I think life is funny sometimes. I think it’s funny because it can throw you in all directions before you finally arrive on a realisation.

You and me, I think we’ve had a lot of realisations: you – that you were effectively dead. I think that’s funny. I can picture you in a grave, the tiny gland below the surface, tapping on wood and listening to the sounds of the heart pumping away; the echoes of wind passing down the trachea; the popping and twirling of the stomach, and you sit up seven years late and say:

“So it is: I am gone.”

Later you heard the popping and dissolving of pills that would replace you.

I, meanwhile, was having a ball.

But then came my realisation: oh my God, you really are important to me. You don’t

know

what

you’ve

got

till it’s gone.

Month by month I finished that sentence.

It’s funny, life: all its twists and turns; the way one minute you think one thing and the next you couldn’t care a dime about that thought. Life’s funny, I think, because my realisation now is:

‘stop moaning, you’re fine!’

Well – that’s not really a realisation – it’s more like a pledge. Or another moan.

I tell myself to stop talking about you as if you’re the assassinated King of Body; I tell myself to think you’re not that important, just to stop me bringing you up in conversations.

But I’m denying the truth: you ARE the assassinated King of Body:

You sit on your throne and you direct your T4 to parts of the land.

Without you the land, part by part, falls apart. Other hormones are knocked sideways; other things go haywire; and other problems are started.

You receive regular taunts from the immune system when you’re well, and when you’re gone someone (something: two pills) has to replace you.

You take it in your power to hurt some people and favour others but we, the people, must ask: are you the victim or the assassin?

In reality you are only a gland (a Prince?) but you deserve the status of a vital organ. In reality you are like the Prince of a tiny kingdom that’s unknown and unmapped.

But I think you know that.

I think you already had that realisation.

And I think that’s why the King Thyroid instructs his sons, the Princes of Bodies, to rage wars in so many millions.

In that case, my dear thyroid so degenerated that you’re now a pauper sitting in a cage and tapping fingernails on the stone, ought we wish you gone or bid you carry on? Should your fellows carry on raging wars as you are ordered then perhaps your status shall be upgraded from that of unknown (gland) Prince to well-known (organ) King, and at that point perhaps your King shall declare peace in all the bodies of the Kingdom. But bid you to stop and we receive our peace right here, today, but your importance is never known and you, my dear thyroid, would have gone without purpose.

Considering deeply this thought,

Louise Sopher

—

Bio: I’m 19, first year at Uni, and I’m in the UK: a rare combination, I think, for a thyroid blogger. I’m hypothyroid (hashi’s so far as I remember) but euthyroid for over a year (yey!) and I wasn’t diagnosed until 17 (very possibly up to seven years late). I took a gap year in the precious jungles of Borneo (Malaysia) and lived with a tribe (see link below). I write wherever my pen leads me – check some of them out below. I am one of those people who can honestly say that when hypo I am one person; when euthyroid another, and that, quite seriously, being treated for thyroid disease changed my life.
Stories From A Settled Tribe, Small But Mighty: A Thyroid Life and Life With A Headless Metabolism

Tags: Dear Thyroid Letters, genetic autoimmune thyroid disease, Hashimoto's thyroid patient letters, hashimoto's thyroiditis, hashimotos symptoms, panic attacks and thyroid, physical symptoms of exhaustion caused by hypothyridism, psychiatric disturbances in Hashimoto's patients

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