Holy shit! It’s June! How did that happen?!?
I missed much of the last eight weeks. It began with a long bout of COVID. Then there was a new job with pretty much an entirely new learning curve to master. There was fitful garden activity, mostly of a cleaning up of disasters variety. And I discovered a new thing about thyroid disease.
This is sort of a surprise. I didn’t know there were still unknowns to trip over… I’ve been without a functioning thyroid for two decades now. No… I’ve known that I had a broken thyroid for two decades. It has probably never worked properly. But it went nuclear in my late thirties — something called a thyroid storm. I have both Graves’ antibodies and Hashimoto’s antibodies flooding my veins. My first endocrinologist said I had the highest concentration of both she’d ever seen. Like I want those sorts of distinctions…
Anyway, it was irradiated and mostly killed shortly after the storm, and, like millions of people, I’ve been on thyroid hormone replacement ever since, with varying degrees of effectiveness. (Menopause was a fun experience…) Point being, I am used to this. I know a good deal about it. This is also not a rare disorder. It is actually increasingly common, likely related to things like endocrine disrupters and other perks of modernity. There are bookcases dedicated to living with this disease. Type thyroid into a web search and you will never see the end of the hits. So explain to me why a very common over-the-counter medication can pretty much shut down thyroid hormone uptake and this is not printed in giant red lettering on every bottle sold. Why is this an unknown!
COVID messes with my gut. I don’t feel like eating, so the digestive tract is empty more than is good for it. The bizarre lack of taste makes me faintly panicky and nauseous every time I put anything in my mouth. Even when I am hungry, I end up avoiding food. This does not sit well. It gets all frothy with extra acid that isn’t doing anything but digesting my own body. And eventually things like Tums just don’t cut it.
Last time this happened — in the midst of the thyroid meltdown, which also killed my gall bladder — I was prescribed Prilosec. It was sort of effective. I could eat again, though I did not feel great. Now, this was a prescription from a doctor who knew I was on thyroid replacement. This is crucial, because I thought this meant that it was safe for me. (I know there are many things that are not… like ingesting calcium or iron too close to taking the thyroid pill.) These days Prilosec is over-the-counter. You can buy it wherever antacids are sold. So I decided to try it. I bought the generic drug and maybe this made a difference, though I doubt that.
This drug, omeprazole, is one that must build up in your body before it works. It comes as a 14-day course of one time-release pill a day. You feel nothing for the first several days, and then it starts to work. This problem with this is that once it is in your system, it stays there for a long time. It takes up to ten days after the last pill to flush out. There is no time of day in which it is not active in your digestive tract. Which is generally a good thing for those needing relief… unless you are on thyroid replacement.
If you take an antacid like Tums or Mylanta (bleah!), it will calm down things fairly quickly, and then it is metabolized and washed out of your body within hours. It is bad to take your thyroid pill in that time period, but there are many admonitions against doing so. So you don’t do it. Omeprazole seems to work differently. It is also new enough still that there aren’t many admonitions — a situation that needs to change! Because it is much worse than normal antacids.
Normal antacids interfere with uptake. They block some of the paths that ingested thyroid hormone would take to get to the bloodstream for a few hours. Omeprazole renders the entire digestive tract impervious to thyroid medication for weeks . As soon as you start taking it, nothing of your daily pill gets into your body. This is not a minor issue. It should not be uncommon knowledge. It is a literally deadly medication interaction.
I was already sick when I started the treatment. I already felt crappy. I did not notice that I was suddenly feeling more crappy. These past two months have been one long stream of crappy. And after a few days, I did in fact start to feel less nauseated. It was doing what it was supposed to do. That it did not give me more pep and vigor was not alarming. It was not supposed to cure COVID and all its effects after all. So I took the full fourteen days and blamed COVID for the increasing malaise. Unfortunately, I did have a COVID relapse while on omeprazole, so I had every reason to believe that COVID was the culprit (as it usually is…).
COVID does not cause weight gain though. Nor does it notably cause muscle cramping and stiffness. Achiness, yes, but this is different. It feels like rigor mortis, like your muscles are turning to stone. Not only stiff, but completely unresponsive, albeit painfully so. I started getting suspicious when I was walking up the stairs at work one day and felt like my joints had fused. By this time I had been off omeprazole for several days, but that was the only thing that had been new in my life. So that was the first thing I looked into.
I have not spent much time being hypothyroid, that is low in thyroxine. I had the opposite problem most of my life. But I do remember what it feels like. It is quite memorable. You feel dizzy all the time. Your head never stops throbbing. Your heart rate never climbs above 50 beats per minute. You feel like mountains have been settled on your shoulders, like the weight of the world is actively and intentionally crushing your exhausted body. You have no appetite, yet every calorie that accidentally enters your bloodstream is turned to fat. You also retain most of the water you drink. So you gain weight precipitously, ballooning up seemingly overnight. You can’t sit still without falling asleep. Driving is a nightmare. But you don’t appreciate this until well after the fact because all your emotions are muted. The only thing you feel is a diffuse, low-level, objectless anxiety. And pain. Lots of pain.
The day I couldn’t walk up the stairs without conscious effort brought back those painful memories, and I realized that I’d been having increasingly severe hypothyroid symptoms for days. Weeks actually. Two and a half weeks, to be precise. Exactly as long as I’d had omeprazole in my digestive tract.
That day I typed “omeprazole levothyroxine interaction” into Google and found the red letters. Not on the drug bottles. Seemingly not in the literature used by doctors in prescribing the drugs. But there are dozens of studies that show that omeprazole shuts down thyroid hormone uptake. The abstracts for these published studies border on hysteria… unusual in medical writing. Certainly attention grabbing. The worst discovery was that this will continue until omeprazole has washed out of your body completely. It does not get better once you stop taking the drug. It is days, sometimes weeks before thyroxine is once again absorbed into your body. I had a mild panic attack at my desk. Then I called my doctor just to put her on alert. However, there is not much you can do for a speedy recovery.
Thyroid hormone takes a while to reach stasis in the body. When my thyroid gland and its nasty cancerous nodules were ablated (meaning destroyed), it took over six months for the levels of hormone to normalize enough for me to begin taking hormone replacement. (This is the time of hypothyroidism that seared a permanent scar on my memory.) So after the omeprazole was gone and thyroid hormone was making it into my body, it still was many days before I started to improve, before going up the stairs did not feel life-threatening. In all this time, my brain was somewhere on the level of white noise. I could do things only if I made a plodding effort to focus. Starting a new job was super fun… Writing was impossible. (Writing? What is that?)
I also gained an uncomfortable amount of weight. Most of it was water and is falling away now, but there is still a disturbing paunch on my belly and enough cellulite on my arms and thighs to give Barbie a stroke. My brain has recovered and my heart is working properly again. But this fat and the discomfort that goes with it remain. Oi…
Still, I managed to survive. It was a bit questionable there for a few days, but I muscled through mostly on sheer determination. (I don’t generally believe in mind over matter, but sometimes it does seem like intention can overcome some fairly dire circumstances.) And when I regained a free brain cell or two, my first reaction was: WHY DID I NOT KNOW THIS! Why is this not common knowledge? There are millions of people on thyroid hormone replacement and most of them will suffer from acid stomach from time to time. Why is this drug interference not printed on every bottle sold? At least it should be printed in the drug interactions warnings on thyroxine prescriptions. Taking omeprazole is as bad as flushing your thyroxine pill down the toilet for two to three weeks straight. And you can’t even skip a day of thyroxine without consequences. (When I went in for heart surgery, I was not allowed any medications — except the thyroid pill.) Something that disrupts uptake so completely for such a long time is quite literally deadly. So, again, why isn’t this well known?
Well and so… this is all a long way around explaining why this blog has been erratic of late. In body, I am mostly recovered now aside from the extra flab (heading into summer, of course…). In mind, I am still trying to rediscover the parts of me that were very interested in the world beyond my small corner. I have a backlog of to-be-reads stored on my desktop and I can’t summon up even a smidgeon of curiosity about any of it. I think I would feel nothing but relief if it all was accidentally lost. Truthfully, I am teetering on the edge of intentionally deleting it all. I’m not sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing.
In any case, I don’t have much time to spend on screens right now. I have quite a lot of real work to catch up on also. This weekend helped on that front because I did nothing but cook and clean and garden. I have Southwest squash and hominy soup in the fridge. There is a fresh loaf of oat sourdough, and the sourdough starter is completely refreshed — even cleaned its manky jar.
I made plain yogurt and a rather standard hummus and strawberry muffins with the last of last year’s frozen berries. The basement is clean. The dry weather has been good in that regard. No mildew and musty stink down there. I also carried the pots of tender herbs outside, though I haven’t cleaned them up yet. They all need trimming and some need repotting. They look brittle and etiolated, like dead spiders. (I also vacuumed up quite a lot of those…)
Arguably, I am not too behind on the gardening front as it was 38°F/3.3°C on Friday morning. My basil is still swearing at me for planting out too early, and I’m lucky the nightshades are going so slow or they’d be dead. But what I have planted has mostly been destroyed by rodent predation. Mostly groundhog. She wiped out the peas. I didn’t even know the cucumbers sprouted until I was planting sweet potatoes and saw a bunch of nubs bitten down to the dirt. Then she ate the sweet potatoes and apparently washed that down with sweet pea flower vines — all of which are poisonous. But then she also ate the highly toxic moonflower. She ate the zucchini sprouts and the Brussels sprouts and all the melons. She even topped the basil. What rodent eats basil! Well, she didn’t eat all of that, so maybe that was just idle destruction.
She just sat on the garlic…
Sad thing about all this is that wiping out the garden when it is all sprout-sized is hardly even a meal. All this garden work gone for maybe two or three cups of sprouted greens. What was the point?
I almost gave up, resolving to grow nothing but hellebore and artemisia. Maybe sage. She doesn’t seem to like sage. (However, she does eat the soft stems of thyme… weirdo…) But then the Irish kicked in and I determined that I was not to be outdone by a fat marmot with a brain the size of a large pea (like those she keeps depriving me of…).
I already have landscape fabric around all the raised beds and the one good thing about the crap sumac and Virginia creeper infestation is that the native soil is less soil than a dense mesh of thick, rubbery roots. So I have that advantage. Burrowing into the bottom of my beds is rather difficult. Not even the chipmunks have managed that trick. So the marmot has to come in from the top.
It is rumored that woodchucks can climb… I’ve not seen much evidence of this, though somebody did get into the small half-barrel planters to eat all the sweet peas. I suppose that might have been ordinary squirrels and not the obese ground squirrel, but I can’t do anything about grey squirrels. I am picking my fight with an animal that I might be able to outmaneuver. Maybe. So I chose to believe that the sweet peas were eaten by an unusually agile marmot, and I engineered my defense system accordingly.
She probably can’t get in from the bottom. She might be able to climb a solid barrier with most of her weight supported by her feet, not her claws. But she probably can’t manage steel mesh without considerable pain. So that’s what I used. I am making fences about 24″ tall out of livestock metal mesh with a 3″ grid. With a bit of assistance from my regular yoga training, I think I can work in the beds over the top of the fence. It’s not going to be comfortable, but there may actually be a reward for the work. The easy-access garden is not producing any rewards.
Banking on this (literally…), I bought an emergency round of seeds and sweet potato slips. Since I only wanted one or two plants of any given cucumber, zucchini or melon, I had wantonly spread all the seed I had for the cucurbits, thinking that maybe a few sprouts would be missed in the rodent feeding frenzy and I’d be left with exactly what I needed. Didn’t count on a highly methodical groundhog trundling through. I was left with exactly nothing. Hence more seeds, this time sown behind barriers. I spent more money than I’d like, but this is war, darn it. Sacrifices must be made…
The one thing that groundhogs do NOT like is being trapped in a space that lacks a fast exit route. She took a long time to decide to enter the pea cage, and that’s open on both ends with a nylon “cage” that her teeth could annihilate in seconds (but don’t tell her that…). I hope that this fear of entrapment will keep her from entering the steel cages. She’s not going to be able to burrow out. She can’t jump over it. And climbing will be slow and painful and probably involve a number of falls. Even pea brain can figure out that this is a death trap — particularly with the foxes that live in my jungle.
But just to further cool her ardor for veg sprouts, I’ve also spread dry straw all over the beds. I had to get a couple bales for the potatoes (which she has not touched… yet…) and the new strawberries (which nobody bothers until the berries are almost red… and then the fruits disappear). So I spread straw on everything else also. This not only annoys animals who are trying to eat succulent greens and coming up with a mouthful of dry straw, but it also retains moisture — much-needed right now — and eventually adds a nice bit of dry carbon to the compost pile. I am also going to buy cheap chile pepper flakes and spread that liberally. I figure if I can smell it, the groundhog will be overwhelmed. This also irritates the squirrels. I have chile-soaked bird seed; they’ve all but abandoned the bird feeders (though there is always that one that, amusingly, has to learn the hard way every spring…).
This all costs more than I want to spend. It takes more time than I really have. And it is disheartening. Nothing can crush your spirits like an erstwhile bed of peas, that you labored over and diligently nurtured, that had once promised delightful snacking and healthy meals, that has been an unrequited yearning for these many growing seasons, reduced yet again to the plant equivalent of rubble. A few woeful remnants of partially masticated stem and leaf scattered over the newly bare and barren earth. (But tell us how you really feel…) So I am doggedly fighting on even though I know it would be better all around — for my bank account, for the health of the planet, for my sanity — if I would just stop. Grow nightshades… and that’s it.
But then she’d probably start eating the chiles… and that would just be the last disaster…
Meanwhile, there are weeds to cull and flowers to dead-head and so much grass to be beaten back. (What moron invented the lawn anyway… grass is only good for baseball and ruminant fodder…) So I can’t spend all my garden time battling the hog. There are so many battles. June and July often feel like one long grinding and protracted siege state. Whack-a-mole with a thousand holes and only one mallet. I sometimes forget why I garden…
But then things like this happen…
So, happy summer to you! And may all your gardens be blissfully marmot-free!
©Elizabeth Anker 2024
By My Solitary Hearth 