I didn't think anyone would be interested. This is pretty much how I explained it to OhLook.
A little over 2 years ago, I started having memory issues. That's what I remember, then the rest was filled in by friends as I don't remember what happened. I had developed hyperparathyroid disease, which ended up being diagnosed as hyperparathyroid hyperplasia, which was pumping copious amounts of calcium into my body, including my brain, flooding my brain with high amounts of calcium. Among other things, the disease causes among other things, memory loss, confusion and vivid hallucinations, I was no longer me. At first people thought I was joking around. My employer was sending me emails regarding my production failing, and finally put me on disability for my spinal issues. My best friend ultimately realized something serious was wrong and got me to my doctor, who sent me to another, who sent me to a specialist who diagnosed it. They did surgery on my parathyroid and corrected that part, and while she was in there, found an aggressive tumor on my thyroid as well, and removed half my thyroid. Because of the tumor on the thyroid, that somehow changed my diagnosis from parathyroid disease to parathyroid hyperplasia, which helped account for the memory loss, hallucinations and confusion being so severe. She explained the surgery was the cure. I started coming back and feeling better, but what she didn't tell me was that it wasn't an immediate cure, and not all of my memory may come back. I don't remember anything of 2022 or most of 2021 except for the vivid hallucinations. There are bits and pieces of memories i can remember, but I can't tell if they were real or part of a hallucination, so I stopped trying to figure out which was which since I will never know, and was driving myself insane trying to remember. I can remember everything before i got sick, and now my memory is working much better. I was later told that what I lost will probably never come back, so I lost two years of my life. I had to re-learn a lot of things, like driving, cooking, basic stuff, and photography. I would look at my cameras, but had very little memory of how they worked. I used YT for the photography and i did create amazing bookmarks before I got sick, so I had all that info to use. it's taken me 6 months to start feeling normal again. I went from 240 pounds down to 117 pounds since I wasn't eating, despite my friends best efforts. I am back up to 160, feel better, still have a few memory issues and work with a therapist on that, but I got my life back, I am back into photography, I can drive again and manage my life. The downside is because of all this, they classified me as disabled since a lot of stuff I did was computer related, and my immediate memory recall is still affected, meaning if I think of something I need to do, when I get up to do it, I forget what I was going to do, and will take a few minutes to remember. The other bad part was sometime in my absence, I lost my phone with all my contacts, so those not near me lost contact with me and and in my confusion, I changed all of my passwords and didn't write them down, so it took me a long time to recover my accounts, including this one. I did post here a few times during that period, and when I came back and read what I wrote, some of it made sense, some not so much and I deleted those posts. I never heard of the disease before I developed it, never knew it existed. But it does, I got it, and now I am back. Stats show 100,000 Americans develop hyperparathyroid disease each year, and 15% of those develop hyperplasia. I clicked all the boxes for hyperplasia.
That's the long story sort of shortened. I'm doing great now, and working on my short term/immediate memory. I feel good, I'm alive thanks to my best friend who truly saved my life, and I'm back to being me, for better or worse. Feel free to ask questions if you have them. I don't mind talking about it, I never mentioned it as I didn't thing people would be interested in it. Sorry for the long post, it probably could have been shorter.
Yes, I want a change
