Before all this nonsense about falling down and crippling my knee, I had asked my new doctor to help me stabilize my meds. I had been bummed by the constant nagging of the schedules and affronted by scoffing doctors who were altogether too obedient to insurance companies and salesmen. As a way of defying them, I wasn't taking my meds. Right. Stupid.
There's a story for scientists about research that gets so absorbed in the exotic and exceptional (zebras) that everyone fails to pay attention to ordinary horses right there in the yard. The planned concept going forward is that this doc will watch the horses and I'll go looking for zebras. For instance, while he's persuading me to do what most diabetic people do, like stay on schedule or add a med, I'm researching metabolic syndrome, the notion that diabetic glucose scores are only one among a cluster that includes high blood pressure, high lipid scores, and big waistlines. Quickly I found myself reading about fibromyalgia, thinning hair, brittle nails, sleep disorders, dry skin, and other things, including mood and difficulty swallowing.
It comes down to thyroid problems. Docs often feel my neck to see what they can figure out, but one doc told me I was too fat to tell anything about it, and others didn't even think of it. (Incidentally, these days no one takes temps though it's supposed to be a clue and though they take weight, they don't take height though I'm at the age when people get shorter due to gravity compressing their spines. Also, pee tests seem reserved for drugs, though we did one for my supposed kidney infection.)
My paternal grandmother, who was mostly Scots but not entirely, was living in Dakota and then in northern Manitoba when she developed a major goiter. This is from a lack of iodine. (Charlie Russell had the same problem.) No one ever mentioned it, but the lump was clear in photos, maybe the size of a pingpong ball. She was cured by a woman who gave her meds based on iodine. People of the British Isles were in a high iodine environment, close to the sea, so their inherited metabolism probably expected iodine, but my grandmother didn't get any. Now that we know so much more about the epigenome that wraps around and influences the genome, we see that some methyl-induced changes in individual genes, the results of environment, can carry over (inherited) across generations.
I read that elements of thyroid called T3 and T4 are so subtle that in the past they were hard to measure and docs were advised not to meddle with them. But now studies have linked them to all the things I'd been reading about, plus emotional factors -- that is, temperaments rooted in hormonal and regulatory molecules below intention or maybe awareness. So the next photo I looked at was this one of two sets of cousins, one three sibs from my father and the other two sibs from his sister. I'm the big girl with two younger brothers. All five cousins have their right legs crossed over their left legs except the little girl whose legs are crossed the other way and whose face is belligerent.
There was never any explanation about the female cousin, the small girl, as to why she was so oppositional and determined, qualifying for Oppositional Defiance Disorder, which wasn't defined in those days. She was consistently like that, to the amusement of everyone but her mother, until both she and her mother had a terrible case of "flu"as she entered puberty. The cousin emerged with a changed disposition and no sense of smell, which means brain damage. The mother was then agoraphobic (the family said "shy") and at the end of life demented. The cousin believes that she is doomed to that fate as well. The evidence so far is still out.
I don't have the same mother and, of course, the genetic contribution of my father (whose mother had goiter) is much smaller. My temperament is not easy and sweet, but so far I've managed somehow -- for the last twenty years by being a hermit writer. But then I'm double X of my mother. One brother (XY) died relatively young and the other is very low-key, married to an older woman and taking jobs below his qualifications.
One father's brother's children had no children. The two sets of cousins from my father's other brothers have had their difficulties, but their genetic endowments were impossible to separate from life situations, which were both lucky and unlucky.
The male cousin from this troubled aunt might be labeled Asperger's if he weren't an engineer. (That's a joke.) But he and his wife both seem a bit, well, autistic, and their daughter almost certainly is a high-performing autism suspect. Her children evidently also have problems. She married an engineer. That's not a joke when reproducing. (The XY of the aunt has been alcoholic since junior high and has had other problems, but seems to be mastering them. He is quite creative, even gifted.)
On a far more cheerful note, I discovered that I felt better if I took fish oil capsules, though it was just trendy at the time, painless and OTC, so why not? Now I wonder whether they contain enough iodine to address thyroid irregularities. I'll begin taking them again. The most pervasive and inconvenient of my tendencies is fibromyalgia, muscle fiber pain. It is sneered at by modern folks as lack of exercise, but I've had aches since I was a small child in the Forties when they were called "growing pains."
Maybe as I approach eighty it's silly to look at such considerations, but the means of getting real data didn't exist before. The very concepts hadn't been hit upon yet. I have no children but the dead brother had a daughter who seems healthy and happy.
By moving back to the prairie I changed the equation to some degree, but my consciousness of the iodine/thyroid connection is stronger. I grew up on salmon every Sunday. I'd love to get it now.
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