I've been feeling more malaise than normal over the last few months along with some other symptoms (severely dry feet, weight fluctuation, dry fluffy hair, hair loss on my legs). Additionally, the pandemic has decreased the opportunities for my wife and I to find alone time, which oddly was not accompanied my any sexual frustration (my way of saying my sex drive has dwindled.) My wife had her thyroid removed as a child, so these symptoms jumped out at me as possibly being related to having low thyroid levels, which I hypothesized could have been triggered by inadequate iodine intake. Iodine is one of those things that a vegan diet lacks (unless you regularly consume iodized salt or certain forms of seaweed, which I do not!). Additionally, although I take Complement vitamins, I was taking only 1/3 of the regular dose since I generally figured my overly-healthy diet was just about cutting it (I eat A LOT of B12 enriched nutritional yeast). Rather than start with my GP, I went to the internet to see if I could confirm my suspicions.

Everlywell has a very reasonably priced "metabolism" test that includes TSH levels, cortisol and free testosterone. This seemed like a reasonable way to get my thyroid level checked (although it turns out that was naive). I forked over $40, waited a week, took the test, waited another week and the results came in. TSH and cortisol normal, with the free testosterone of an average 95 year old man. This result was unexpected, although it's increasingly easy to Google your way in to confirmation that just about all of my symptoms could relate to this result.

So on Friday I got in to see my GP, who mostly ignored the whole story about ordered a battery of tests, which are still trickling in. Slightly low vitamin D and low free t3 (one of the three thyroid tests) along with a confirmation of completely normal TSH levels.