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I'm a fan of Michael Rosen. When I was a kid, my family owned You Wait Till I'm Older Than You! and I, my brother and sister used to quote the story about the peaches. "Dad, the peaches!"

I was recently reading a book by Michael Rosen about his life and I was surprised to discover that he has hypothyroidism. In the book, he describes how he went for ten years before he was diagnosed. That's ten years suffering from untreated hypothyroidism symptoms. Somehow I'm not surprised = from my own experience, doctors are generally shockingly poor at being able to diagnose hypothyroidism.

Here's an excerpt from his book where he talks about his condition.

I have no thyroid gland. This means that I have to take pills to replace what the thyroid gland produces. Every morning Igo to the bathroom cabinet, take down the boxes of pills, pull out a silver sheet with pimples on it, and pop out the pills, put them in my mouth and flush them down with a few mouthfuls of water.

[...]

I tell them the story of how bit by bit over ten years I got slower and slower and colder and colder, and my fingers and toes swelled up, my voice went gruff and my hair went frizzy ... and the doctors told me that it was my kidneys. Until this clever consultant at the hospital figured out that I had eaten my own thyroid gland. My antibodies had attacked it and consumed it. And I tell them that he was a kind of detective, piecing together what he could see that was odd about me, how my speech was slurred and even my lips and eyelids were swollen.

Then there's the scene where he gets the students in and tells them to diagnose what's wrong with me. He goes out of the room.

'Tell us,' says one.

I don't.

The consultant comes back into the room.

'Well?' he says.

'Kidneys,' they say.

He explodes.

'Just because I'm a kidney specialist and the patient has been referred to me doesn't mean that it's kidneys. You haven't even felt his skin, or taken his pulse, or tested his reflexes! Look at this,' he said.

He picked up a small rubber hammer and whacked my knee.

'See that! Nothing! No response at all! Ask yourselves, why? What illness results in a lack of reflex, swollen eyelids and lips, cold skin and a slow heart-rate? Mmm?'

[...]

And that's why every morning I pop pills out of a silver strip.