A Demon Hides Under a Cloak of Tiredness

Workplace stress and the heavy demands of life generally can mask the onset of a serious medical condition.

Report: Jeanne-Vida Douglas

'The thing about stress is that it plays havoc with your health precisely at the time you need to stay well,' the owner and founder of corporate training company Cheeky Food Group, Leona Watson, says. 'Last year I was seriously wondering how we were going to survive. The financial crisis had really started to hit in November 2008, so we had a quiet Christmas then started January without the normal cash reserves. I wasn't sleeping well, my hair seemed to be coming out in handfuls and it was a couple of months before I actually went and had something done about it.'
Watson's symptoms may have seemed like the classic stresses of running a business but they had a much more specific origin. Like more than 500,000 other Australians, she suffers from a condition .called hypothyroidism. The thyroid is a small gland that sits around the windpipe delivering hormones into the blood stream. Hormones produced by the thyroid regulate the entire metabolic process by which food is converted into energy and delivered into every cell in the body. Blood sugar levels, circulation, appetite, cardiac rate, muscle tone; vitamin uptake, all depend on the thyroid producing the correct amounts of hormones at the right time.

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Hypothyroidism, where the thyroid does not produce enough hormones, affects about 7 per cent of the population although its symptoms are varied and can often be mistaken for other mental and physical conditions. Its twin, hyperthyroidism, where the thyroid is overactive and releasing too many hormones, hits only 1 per cent of the population but can be equally hard to identify. With a family history of hypothyroidism, Watson knew what to look out for and had been diagnosed in her early twenties. Sufferers need to take, a small dose of Thyroxin every day to replace the hormone that is no longer produced by the thyroid.
Although the condition is treatable, it is also permanent and can be exacerbated by stress: 'I was a really young person when I was first diagnosed, so when the doctor gave me the prescription it initially didn't compute that I'd need to be on this medication for the rest of my life,' Watson says. 'But even last year when I had all the symptoms again, it was two months before I made the connection and went to my doctor to get my blood tested again.'
Thyroid conditions are about four times as prevalent in women as they are in men and the incidence increases significantly in women over the age of 50. The conditions are of particular concern to business owners and managers· such. .as Watson because the symptoms are easy to dismiss as the result of a heavy workload.
Watson says: 'It was late February by the time I was doing something about it, and it wasn't until we got near the end of the financial year that companies began to realise that they had a little extra to spend arid business really started to pick up again. By that time I was on the right level of Thyroxin and so I had the energy and the clarity I needed to find solutions for the business.’