Thingsthatgo, I've been wondering about best time to take the B12, as it should be on empty stomach. Mid-morning at school perhaps. He'd need school to be on board with him setting a reminder on his phone or he'd be always forgetting.
I wasn't expecting this at all when I took him to the doctor's. It was just a lasting set of things that each was not very remarkable but in conjunction meant he was having more and more days of feeling unwell and fewer and fewer days on which he was completely well.
-Recurring tummy aches which I suspected might be due to constipation.(now I know that low B12 can cause constipation)
-occasional 'racing heart' even when calm and at rest
- increasing bouts of dizziness/feeling faint which I thought was just a low blood pressure issue, probably due to growth spurt
These were the things I told the GP who at first didn't seem too concerned but 'luckily' DS demonstrated the issue by nearly fainting while wearing the blood pressure measuring thing!
I had also noticed that he was often very pale, he got headaches, once he got tinnitus for a short while, once he got pins and needles in his feet, all things I never put together, but now I know they read like a symptom list of low Vit B12.
He also gets dry, itchy skin.
He was/is also frequently very tired. This I took as normal as he often couldn't fall asleep. So if he was still awake at 1am and then had to get up for school at 6:30, obviously he was tired.
For this reason I also didn't take him to be seen for a long time, I figured it could all be due to lack of sleep.
Turns out that lack of B12 can mess with your melatonin production, causing problems falling asleep!
So symptoms for now all about the B12, which makes sense as the thyroid is still subclinical.
Though actually the thyroid values are high for TSH, low normal for free T4, and high for free T3. This stumped me for a bit but it seems that in the early stages of Hashimoto's, T4 goes down, causing TSH to go up (feedback loop), causing a higher rate of T4 to T3 conversion, using up all reserves so to say. So for a short time you can be 'hypo' and yet have high T3, before it crashes out.
My mum was like that, all the symptoms of hyper, losing lots of weight. Then crashed with huge problems (brain damage probably from low B12) putting all the weight back on and more, all the worst symptoms of hypo, finally diagnosed with Hashimoto's. Took her years to get her life back and some of the brain damage is permanent (visible holes in her brain in scans) but she seems to have eventually built new pathways in her brain around the holes, and has gone from completely disabled to fully functioning and enjoying life.
I'd really like to avoid this for DS obviously! So will not be taking any chances with the B12 and keeping a close eye on those thyroid levels.