Mysteriously fatigued
Soon after she turned 51, Lena Caralopoulos was so tired, it was as though each section of her body was being dissected and crushed into submission. “It’s menopause,” said her GP. Then she began to feel really cold. “It’s menopause,” said her gynecologist. She watched as her hair got brittle (See: What it's like to lose your hair) and thin, and endured skin rashes, puffy eyes, weight gain and constant fatigue. She fretted as her sight deteriorated and her ability to retain new information disappeared. It was all due to menopause, said her doctors.
Countless other women had gone through this too. Doctors advised that her symptoms were so obvious that blood tests weren’t warranted. She resigned herself to the possibility that maybe she was having a particularly hard menopause and that her lot was to simply suffer through it.
But, at 52, when her hands began to spasm, Caralopoulos decided she’d had enough. She knew that the symptoms of menopause did not include this, at least not according to any of the literature she’d read. It was time to ask a family friend who was a doctor to prescribe a full blood workup. A good thing too: It turned out her thyroid, a gland in the endocrine system that produces and releases hormones that kick-start every cell in the body, was shutting down due to Hashimoto’s disease, an autoimmune condition in which her own antibodies were attacking the gland’s cells. “I didn’t know what to think,” she tells me. “I’d had months of misery, but after I was diagnosed I decided the best thing to do was learn as much about thyroid disease as I could. I needed to be proactive. If I wasn’t, who would fight for me?”
Fending for themselves
It’s a good question. Thousands of women are told what they’re going through is absolutely normal for their age. When they don’t buy that and ultimately learn their problems are related to a gland that weighs an ounce or less, many are left to fend for themselves.
This often involves wading through the literature, including confusing warnings about environmental toxins and the pros and cons of traditional versus holistic approaches. Should they allow doctors to “kill” their thyroids and replace its function with a synthetic drug, or should they take natural thyroid extract, which comes from pigs? Or do they need to take medication at all?
There are no official statistics, but the Thyroid Foundation of Canada in Kingston, Ont., estimates that about 200 million people worldwide have thyroid conditions, with one in three Canadians affected. Of those affected, the majority are women, and while some may be struck in their teens and twenties, most are over 40.
Foundation president Ted Hawkins says he’s heard many similar versions of the following scenario: A woman visits her doctor to complain of fatigue and puffiness, of an abnormal thickening of her skin so that it has the texture of orange rind, of sensitivity to cold and of irregular, painful menses. She is told she is normal, she is too fat, too harried and stressed or too inactive. Or — as in the case with Caralopoulos — she’s told she’s simply entering that time of life when she should expect her hormones to go wonky because that’s what women’s bodies do.
Hawkins notes that doctors aren’t trained to think of thyroid issues as a first or even second diagnosis, which means that women have to be their own best advocates in the fight to get tested and treated. “If you’re not feeling well, you aren’t going to see an endocrinologist first off,” he says. “The thyroid has never been high-profile, and it’s one of the most under-diagnosed, misunderstood health issues around today. But think of it as the first domino. When it falls, so eventually does everything else.”
