Entry 029

Long time, no blog post. It’s been months since I’ve written and if you’re taking the time to read this, you deserve to know why I’ve been quiet.

I have a diagnosis.

In August 2023—two years after my first miscarriage—I saw a new doctor at a different hospital four hours away from home. My husband and I made the trip down and back and though we were with the doctor for only a couple hours, we left feeling more hopeful than we’d been in a long, long time.

The doctor ran the same routine tests and scans that I’ve had done time and time again so she could see the results firsthand, and the fact that she did was life changing. On the same blood test to check thyroid function that’s been run more than once before, she noticed an elevated—but within normal range—number that seemed a little too high for someone of my health. She decided to look deeper with a more complex thyroid panel, which uncovered that I have the autoimmune disease Hashimoto’s.

Autoimmune is a disease in which the immune system attacks the body’s healthy cells. With Hashimoto’s, the healthy cells targeted are those of the thyroid. Before my diagnosis, I had no idea how important the thyroid is. It produces hormones that impact nearly every system and process in the body—from regulating growth and brain development to controlling digestive and heart function, a well-working thyroid is critical. Untreated hypothyroidism (the cause of Hashimoto’s) commonly leads to heart disease, nerve damage, infertility and—you guessed it—miscarriage.

The doctor prescribed a synthetic hormone medication to offset the hypothyroidism caused by my immune system attacking my thyroid. I was instructed to take it until it balanced my thyroid numbers, then we could try to have a baby for the sixth time—and that I would be on the medication for the rest of my life. I was tired of treating things at surface level. If we know what’s wrong, why would I only medicate the result of the disease instead of treating the issue at its source? So I researched and I read books and I found another doctor—this one, a functional medicine doctor.

I won’t get into everything I’ve been doing to put my autoimmune disease into remission for the past 5 months, but I’ll give you an overview. To start, you should know three things have to be present for an autoimmune disease—you must have the gene, you must have intestinal permeability, and there must have been a trigger that kicked the disease into gear. Without any one of those factors, the disease is not active.

Of course, we can’t change my genetic makeup and we don’t know what my trigger was, so the most important change I could make was to the intestinal permeability. To heal my intestinal permeability, or “leaky gut” if you will, I’ve removed gluten, dairy, soy, caffeine and alcohol from my diet entirely, and I very much avoid added sugar, corn and nightshades. Intestinal permeability allows things like gluten to seep into the body from the intestines. The immune system recognizes these “foreign invaders,” attacks them, then codes them to be recognized as a threat when they enter the body. The foods I’ve eliminated also cause inflammation inside the body and are difficult to digest. When an autoimmune disease is present, you want things to be as easy for the body as possible so its energy can be spent on the existing problems it needs to correct, not problems added to it.

Other things I’m doing to kick Hashimoto’s to the curb are reducing the toxic burden on my body by using nontoxic personal care and household items, monitoring and controlling my blood sugar to decrease the (surprisingly high) number of times my brain sends a cortisol response to something happening in my body—subconsciously sending me into fight or flight every time, learning how my body reacts to things like exercise and stress, killing off a bad bacteria infesting in my gut know as mosaic mimickers, restoring my hormones to normalcy after five consecutive failed pregnancies, prioritizing rest so my body has time to heal, and learning how to breath again. That’s right, at some point during my life, my body has stopped converting oxygen properly, leaving me with very unsteady blood oxygen levels and sending more of that stress hormone, cortisol, coursing through my body. 

So that’s where I’ve been for the past 5 months.

There’s no telling for how long the disease has been active in my body, but we do know that it’s certainly not helpful during pregnancy. We won’t know if Hashimoto’s is the only answer we’ve been searching for until we’re ready to conceive again, but it is at least a piece to the puzzle we’ve been trying to solve for years. 

Get your thyroid levels checked, friend.

Emily Lindquist