Bump It Up

I'm a little late in posting this, but I got the results of a blood draw about a week and a half ago.

If you remember, the dessicated pig thyroid was good except that I was getting to much T3. This bums me out a lot. I had high hopes for piggie thyroid! On NatureThroid my TSH was great, about .89, but my T3 was too high and my T4 too low. I still had arthritis and my cycle was about 20 days. I think all you ladies reading this will agree that 20 days is way too short. My good friend and I agreed-that's time enough for one-half PMS and one-half period!

*Sigh.*

In any case, my doc agreed to switch me from NatureThroid back to 100 mcg of Tirosint to see if my numbers would all look a little better.

After six weeks, my TSH is at 3.2 (a little bit higher than it should be), my T3 is 3.1 (a little lower than it should be), and my T4 is at 1.56, which is about right.

We bumped up my dosage to 112 mcg of Tirosint and so far it's been good.

The only thing I'm frustrated with right now (besides unsuccessfully trying to stay off meds!) is that the first time I tried out Tirosint, probably 18 months ago now, 88 mcg was enough for my levels to be awesome. I felt awesome and I had no arthritis. It was shortly after I started on 88 mcg that I decided to try Chinese medicine.

In any case, my big question is why was 88 mcg good then, but not enough now?! Am I not absorbing the med well enough? Am I having some issue converting T4 (the stuff in the pill) to T3 (the form your body uses)? :/ I have no answers for this. Interestingly enough, the thyroid is where this conversion takes place, so some argue that a Hashimoto's thyroid (one beat down by your own body) isn't up to the task.

Other Applicable Updates:

Diarrhea: (I am laughing my ass off that I even wrote that. And for all the world to see.) Better, especially when I take pro-biotics and peppermint/ginger oil. Even better still when I don't eat insoluble fiber. The hardest thing is that I really, really like popcorn. That's, uh, pretty much 100% roughage. :)

Arthritis: Better with the increased dosage. On 100 mcg, I didn't have a lot of arthritis in my fingers or ankle, but for some reason my shoulder was freezing up and popping a lot. :( That's slowly been improving over the last week on the bigger dose. We'll see what happens in the long run.