April 6 2006: In the beginning: I feel like I'm dying - do I have cancer?

My story starts at the beginning of 2005 when I woke up one morning - just like that - and realised something was seriously wrong.

I thought I was dying - asumed I had cancer, a disease that claimed my mother at the young age of 44.

Now, aged 42, I thought the thing I dreaded most had finally happened to me.

It was 5am and I had to get out of bed to produce a daily news service I provide for a internet business publication. My legs felt like they were cement bollards, my head was fuzzy and my muscles felt like I had been in the gym continuously for the last month, which I hadn't.

Indeed, I could not use the gym anymore. About a month or so ago, I was doing my usual routine on the treadmill and had to stop halfway. I was knackered. I was always knackered from that point on so I stopped going to the gym.

It was about that time my right eyelid started twitching. It was infuriating. I felt like some kind of imbecile. It wasn't visible to anyone else, but it felt like a mini earthquake in my face to me and it just wouldn't stop. My right eye was gritty and swollen and I experienced odd sensations in the nose and muscles near my nose.

I found someone on the internet who had the same problem and had found calcium and magnesium supplements had helped him. I tried it and within 48 hours the tics had gone. However, they returned after a week, so I increased the dose.

Then the phenomenon moved from my right to my left eye, albeit less frequent thanks to the supplementation, and weekly acupuncture helped reduce the severity.

When I think back I now realise that I had gradually become more and more tired over a period of three to four months. It was so gradual as to be almost undetectable until it got to that dreadful morning in January 2005 when I struggled to get out of bed.

I had put increasing tiredness, up until then, down to the fact that at 42, I was no spring chicken anymore, my early starts, 12-hour work days, one full day off a week and the stresses of adopting two children with behavioural and emotional difficulties.

I toyed with the idea of going to the doctor when people started commenting my face had become fatter and puffy and my voice had suddenly become "Rod Stewart" - gravelly and husky. Incidentally, I read in How I Reversed My Hashimoto's Thyroiditis Hypothyroidism, by Robert T. Dirgo that indeed, Rod Stewart, is hypothyroid so we are all in good company.

I felt like sleeping a lot of the time and pushing myself to work was a great effort. I was shocked to find I had put on 1 stone. I weighed 10st 51bs at beginning of November and when I went to my GP at the end of January I was 11st 51b I have always been a thin person and eat a healthy near-vegan diet.

One of the most embarrassing and distressing problems was going to the toilet. If anyone is eating a sandwich, read this section later. The first bit of faeces would come out okay, but then it would just stay stuck up there and I'd get through lots of toilet paper to keep myself clean. Okay, too much detail I hear you all say, but I want this to be an honest blog, warts an' all. I'd sit on the toilet for more than half an hour sometimes, practising slow breathing, Yoga techniques and autogenic exercisess in a bid to get it all out.

I've always been someone who hardly feels the cold but now I started feeling cold all the time. Went to Marks & Spencer and bought thermal underwear which helped.

So here I was lying in bed, focusing all my effort to drag myself upstairs to the office and attempt to meet my 8.30am deadline for my news stories. It's all a blur now, but somehow I managed to make it to my computer, wade through the national newspapers and get my work out in time assisted by copious amounts of black coffee and Manuka honey which I use instead of sugar.

I went to see the doc that same day. When he heard all my symptoms, he told me he wanted me to get my blood tested. Thyroid disease was one of the things he was looking for. I had my blood tested and was told I'd have to wait a week for the results.

A day after the blood tests I got a call from the surgery telling me I must make an appointment right away. This was it, I thought, as I mused I'd be the only person in history to have Chuck Berry's My Ding-a-Ling played at my funeral.

My GP, God bless 'im, greeted me with a broad smile. "You have the worst case of hypothyroidism we've ever seen in this surgery."

Bli'me don't look so happy mate, I thought to myself, wondering what on earth hypothyroidism was and whether I was going to live to see 43.

These were my results:

. Thyroid stimulating hormone (TSH) 72.64 mu/L and

.T4, 5.1 pmol/L.

The normal level for TSH as defined by the lab that produced my blood results were between 0.35-4.94 mu/l, so you can see, I was way off the Richter scale. The lab defined the normal levels for T4 as 9-19 pmol/L. Here, too, I was also on another planet.

For those of you who don't know, the pituitary gland releases TSH to increase thyroid hormone production, T4. T4 is converted into T3 which influences all the cells and tissues in your body. If you are hypothyroid, the cells and organs of your body slow down and you can suffer a vast array of symptoms. So, to make it simple, my pituitary was having to work overtime producing more TSH to try to get my thyroid to produce T4 but my thyroid had gone on strike so however much TSH my pituitary pumped out, my thyroid refused to respond with T4 production.

Why? I had a form of hypothyroidism known as Hashimoto's thyroiditis, so named by Japanese chappy who discovered it. In a nutshell, the body produces anti-thyroid antibodies. For reasons that are mostly unknown - and that is the frustrating part and why I insist no doctor can positively say you cannot recover from thyroid disease because they know so little about the causes - the body's own anti-bodies identify the thyroid as an alien that needs dispatching and attacks it.

No wonder I felt ill!

Everyone's symptoms are different so every ailment tends to get attributed to the thyroid disorder when in fact it could be something else. It is very important to be aware of this so that another condition is not overlooked.

For a good explanation of the mechanics of the thyroid, I would refer you to http://www.btf-thyroid.org/.

But, at least now I had a diagnosis. I was ill. It wasn't in my mind. And the good news, the doc said, was that it could be fixed with daily thyroxine tablets, a synthetic form of the T4 my thyroid was not producing enough of.

"For how long?" I asked

"For ever," he said.

"Great - I'm on drugs for life," I said.

"Don't think of it as a drug but a hormone replacement to produce something your body is not able to make."

"Thanks Doc - HRT at 42 - and I'm a man".

He printed out a sheet explaining hypothyroidismdsim and its treatment and dispatched me with a prescription for 50mcg of thryoxine a day for three weeks to be increased to 100 mcg thereafter...

I was stunned. What did this mean? What effect would it have on my life? I was immortal, wasn't I? Would I ever feel well again?

So began what I was told would be a lifetime of medication...

Not if I could help it!