While the answers to your woes may not come from your doctor or your thyroid hormone medication, you can still liberate yourself from the confines of standard prescription and regain influence on your Hashimoto's health care.

I was up at 6 am with the kids and by 9 am, I was lying on my floor asleep and drooling as the toddlers crawled around on mommy.  My hair was falling out, I was steadily gaining 2-3 pounds a month, my skin was turning to leather, I was depressed, my joints and muscles ached, and I was freezing cold all the time. My kids were losing their mom and my husband was losing his partner.

My body had fought and hung on for me for seven years (I thank it every day for that), and now I felt I owed it the same respect. Once I really cleaned up my diet, that’s when I saw the greatest improvements.  It was not easy, I won’t say it was, but it is worth it for the fact that I was able to get my life back.

The "damn good" labor story that thankfully ended happily but ended with a diagnosis of lupus and sjogren's on top of hashimoto's, and the attitude and mindset shift that brought strength on top of a great sense of humor.

With my moves across different nations during my lifetime, what has surprised me is how disjointed and poor it can seem in some of the developed countries as well. The narrative that follows highlights my journey with my eventual diagnosis of Hypothyroidism, and various other related maladies. I hope that women from across the globe will benefit from the nuggets of information embedded in my experiences, and go on to make better, more informed decisions about their personal healthcare.

For me, the next phase was a heroic jump into an unsustainably perfect way of living with an autoimmune disease. I bought an arsenal of health books, lost at least 8 of my 9 lives to Google (and self-diagnosed myself with 34.5 other diseases), interrogated numerous doctors, and went to weird support groups in dark church basements.

At a year and a half postpartum I’m feeling more optimistic about balancing life as the mother of a toddler and coping with Hashimoto’s thyroiditis. I remember last year coping with this condition wasn’t exactly a walk in the park. I was dealing with symptoms like fatigue, brain fog, and it was taking a while to get back to a regular monthly cycle.