I knew something was wrong when I started to go to sleep around midnight with no effort. It was too good to be true.

Since my teenage years, I have been struggling with insomnia. It is as if every night I need to sort my whole problems, and the problems of others, once I go to bed and turn off the lights. It is then that my mind starts to function in ten times its capacity and turns nonstop as a vinyl disk.

But strangely since about six months ago I started to be sleepy even before midnight. My eyes would get heavy in front of the TV and I had a hard time dragging myself to bed. I can confess that it was a very pleasant feeling. I knew that once in bed it was a matter of few minutes and I would soon go where my dear friend calls “the chocolate island”. I never knew sleeping could be such a sweet experience.

My sleepiness didn’t stop there though. The whole day I would feel like I had been hit by a truck. I had a crazy desire to take a nap on my desk, in the lab, in the bus, everywhere! When at home, I would take a nap in the afternoon and enjoy every minute of it.

This new euphoria was accompanied by an undesired steady weight gain. It seemed that every week I was getting larger, like a balloon. This part was much less fun. I kept buying new cloths while sleeping on the way to the boutiques, hoping that they would be the last ones before I loose the extra kilos.

At first I blamed it on stress. You can blame everything on stress, work, and fatigue. But fortunately I know myself better, and I knew that I have never felt like this even in my worst stressful years. So I went to see a doctor. I thought it must be a vitamin deficiency or something like that.

Tests were done and the verdict fell. I have a low functioning thyroid, called hypothyroidism. But like everything else in my life, it was a borderline condition. Not really clear how to deal with it.

My doctor recommended that we do an echography. The echographer, who turned out to also be an author of medical trillers, put the cold jelly thing on my throat and rolled the scanner up and down before announcing his finding. “There it is, you have an isolated nodule”, he said proudly. I thought for few seconds that seemed much longer, then with a voice that only I could hear, I asked: “What does that mean?”. He replied in a reassuring tone: “It means that the nodule is all alone”! “It has been there probably for ten years”, he continued. What a romance!

I suddenly felt a deep nostalgia for my lonely nodule who has been hiding in my thyroid gland for about ten years. It’s crazy, but since that announcement I rewind in my head all the events that have happened to me over the past ten years and try to include my nodule in them. How could I miss her existence?!

I came back to my doctor and told her that I have a “lonely” nodule. She laughed and said that we should check it out, but a priori it seems not to be a problem. The first couple of days I was very worried. The thought of having something being poked in my throat was not so pleasant. But it is surprising how quickly we adapt to every news. Now, I can’t wait to get over with the test and move one.

My ex-boss seems to belong to the Hypothyroid fan club. “Oh! That is nothing”, she said once I told her about the diagnosis. “All my family are hypos. I am hypo, my mother was hypo and my daughter is hypo. You just need to take a little pill every day”, she said with a huge smile.

So here I am, hooked on this new pill Levothyrox, since ten days. I am still fat and bloated, but the sweet sleeping nights are already gone. I am not very trilled to have to take a pill every morning until the end of my life, but I am happy that for six months I savored the luxury of sleeping at a decent time without having to review past, present and future problems before entering the chocolate islands.