Parathyroid

Having too much of anything is not really good for your health. It is a fact of life. Everyone needs calcium for stronger bones but too much of calcium can leads to serious illness as in the case of parathyroidism.

Every year, I'll be having my annual check up (especially now that I'm turning 40++). I've had the same result each year..I'm perfectly healthy. It's just that I had too much calcium in my blood. The doctor would advise me not to take too much milk or reduce my calcium intake. That's all.

When my youngest son was born in 2003, he had to be hospitalised due to lack of calcium when he was 2 weeks old. The hospital took my blood sample and discovered that my calcium was high. Since I was not the sick one, no one bothered to check further. My son was fed with fluid calcium daily and after 2 weeks, he's back to normal.

As for me, my life went on as usual. Early this year, I started to have high blood, shot right up to 170/140. My blood fluctated inconsistently. Every now and then I started having migraine and I knew that my blood must have shot high. The doctor prescribed me high blood medication but I refuse to take because it did not jive with my symptoms. I did an early checked up in March this year and the result was as usual, healthy except for my high calcium. When I asked the doctor if there is anything wrong with me that caused the high calcium, he advised me to do another test on PTH (Parathyroid hormone test). The result came out positive. I have a case of hyper-parathyroid.

What is Hyper-Parathyroid? Everyone has 4 to 6 parathyroid glands in their necks. These glands function is to control and monitor the calcium flow in your body so that the muscle and nervous system can function properly. Once the glands detected low calcium level in the blood, they will disperse parathroid hormone(PTH) into the blood which will subsequently break the calcium in the bones to be dispersed into the blood and also promotes calcium intakes by the kidneys.

In the case of hyper-parathyroid,at least one of these glands is hyper-active and produced excessive PTH into the blood and causes serious calcium imbalance.The doctor used to tell me that the symptom is known as "moans, groans,stones, bones and psychiatric overturns" meaning moans -feeling ill,hyper tension, groans - abdominal pain(gastric), stones- kidney, bones-bone pain and psychiatric overturns-lethargy, fatigue, depression, memory lapses. And I had most of the symptoms.

The bad news is there is no medicine/cure for this illness. The only cure is to remove the over active parathyroid galnd. So, I had it removed in May 9,2008. The operation was done in Putrajaya Hospital because no other hospital has the specialist for PT cases except UKM and Putrajaya Hospital. Well, I chose the best doctor. Since then, no more high blood, lesser bone pain, better temperament or gastric.
However...the bad news is the operation had cause an injury to my voice nerve chord. The gland was on the nerve and resulted with me losing my voice..That is another story...