The reason I'm still in Canada is that I have hypothyroidism. A doctor said so, a few months ago. Then he went on to say some other stuff. I wasn’t really listening, because I was too busy celebrating in my head.

I was celebrating because no-one believed I was ill until that point. Even my girlfriend didn't believe me.

The reason people were sceptical is that when your body attacks you, it doesn’t do it by stabbing you or arranging a hit on you with the mafia. So when people saw a lack of a bloody knife and American-Italians, they concluded that I wasn’t in mortal danger after all. Instead, they labelled me as a hypochondriac!

Now I know they were wrong. There's a genuine problem with my thyroid gland. By the way, this gland is invariably described as "butterfly-shaped", which makes it sound rather nice. Actually it looks like this:

Eww. Like, gross and stuff.

The thyroid makes this super cool shit called T3, which gives your body energy and stops your hair falling out. Without T3, you have the metabolism of an elderly tortoise and you'll always have big bags under your eyes - big enough to carry all your shopping home in from Tesco’s, even your 10 lb sack of potatoes. You'll never need plastic bags again. And no-one thinks you’re cool anymore because you're too busy being grumpy and tired to even think of being cool.

The good news is there's a cure called Synthroid, an artificial T3 replacement. But there's a problem: figuring out what dosage to take. Go too high, and I suffer hyperthyroidism, the opposite of my current situation. My body would burn too much energy and I would spontaneously self-combust. No doubt my suicidal body loves this idea.

To be healthy, the dosage has to be a happy medium. Not too high, not too low, like nice porridge, not the shite made with water but the one with milk in it.

So I'm creeping up to the correct dosage, slowly. Every two months or so I go to the doctor to see if I need a dosage increase. I'm on 75 mcg at the moment. Is that high enough? I still feel like shit so I guess it's not. According to some statistics I just pulled out my arse, the average dosage is just over 200 mcg.

So for me to reach 200 mcg, the doc will have to increase the dosage another five times, so I’ll hit the magic number in a year from now. A bloody year! I suspect I won't even be in Canada for that long. Instead, I'll have to entrust myself to the NHS or whichever shitty health system of the third-world country I happen to be in. As I said, the chance of finding a good doctor is about 1 in 1000, so I might as well stay in Canada as long as I can, like a fucking barnacle.