In which we start at my beginning.

Mid 1998, I discover that not only am I miscarrying again but that my thyroid levels are off.

This is astonishing in one respect, the news is delivered by several health care providers who must assume universally I have basic medical training.

I do not.

I have an Honours degree in Archaeology. Thyroids are not big in archaeology, though, like everything, I'm sure there are niche areas in every discipline.

So I absorb the information and go on to miscarry again.

Five days before Christmas. I have been married less than two years. Third miscarriage in the time it would have taken me to carry a single child to term.

Thyroid is mentioned again.

Many changes are wrought - my husband, to whom I am alternately clinging to like a limpet and raging furiously to leave me, and I move interstate and without my thyroid being commented upon are subjected to a bevy of interesting medical procedures.

March 2000 I am delivered of a daughter. This is is wonderful. We go on, without even using the word thyroid in a scrabble game to add a son to our family.

In 2004 we decide to try for another baby and somewhere at about six weeks pregnant I spend most afternoons hanging onto the toilet base for dear life while my small daughter makes her even smaller brother dinner by getting milk out of the refrigerator, weet-bix from the cupboard and mixing them together in bowls. After several weeks of coming home from work to find us thus arrayed across the house, my husband suggests I should visit our family doctor.

She orders blood tests and my thyroid is mentioned again. Apparently it is "low". She may have elaborated on this but I was too busy trying not to be ill in her pot plants. She suggests medication as a last resort and asks me to increase my iodine intake.

Luckily I had had the forethought despite being marooned on a raft of grief, of getting my medical records from my previous doctor, one of the many who mentioned my thyroid was "off" during my year of miscarriages and dimly I remember to tell my family doctor this.

The term "subclinical hypothyroidism" is bandied about - a subject I shall return to with reasonable ferocity in a later post.

I increase my iodine (by eating kelp and prawns) and I stop being dreadfully ill and enjoy the pregnancy. We move house. The birth goes very well.

I am a mother of three, life proceeds with its ups and its downs, there is great sadness (my mother in law dies) and great joys.

My thyroid is not mentioned again for a while.