Exhausted all day and need to sleep 12 hours every night
Hello, this is my first time using this sub so sorry if I'm doing it wrong.
I have always been kind of a sleepy person. My whole life I tend to sleep in late and be a little tired throughout the day. It's a bit of an inconvenience but it's always been manageable. I've had depression pretty much my whole life so I just chaled it up to that.
Around three years ago my exhaustion suddenly got drastically worse. It got to the point where I had to sleep twelve hours every night or I would be too tired to function during the day and even when I did get enough sleep I still was pretty groggy most of the time. My sleep getting worse coincided with a really horrible mental health episode so I once again thought it was just a side effect of that.
Since then I've gotten properly medicated for my mental health issues and am emotionally feeling the best I've ever felt; my depression is pretty much non existent now but instead of getting better the sleep issues got worse.
I finally decided to go see a doctor to see if I could get a sleep study (there're issues with sleep apnea in my family) but before the doctor referred me to a sleep study they wanted to get blood work done just to rule other things out. Once the blood work came back they found my thyroid levels were actually really bad and I had some vitamin deficiencies. They put me on a low dose (25 mcg) of levothyroxine and told me to take a multivitamin.
They did blood work again eight weeks later and the vitamin deficiencies were better but they said one of my thyroid levels was improving but the other was getting worse. They upped my dose to 50 mcg and we waited another eight weeks. I also got a thyroid ultrasound because thyroid cancer also runs in my family but that came back normal.
After the dose was upped I became much worse. The sleep was the same but throughout the day I was so excited I had multiple instances where I had to pull over to the side of the road cause I felt I was about to fall asleep behind the wheel. I've been so exhausted I can't even engage in hobbies like writing that I can do while sitting down. It's really affecting my life.
I was totally convinced my thyroid levels were going to be absolutely awful but to my surprise the blood work shows my thyroid levels were perfect. I just got back from the doctor's today and the doctor openly admitted she doesn't really have any clue what's wrong with me and that the increase in the severity of my symptoms doesn't make much sense.
She decided get blood work to check my b12 levels and to also check my lithium (I take lithium as an anti depressant. Yes I know lithium can cause the issues I'm having but the issue started before I started taking the lithium)
Overall I'm feeling defeated. I'm so tired of living like this. I can only work jobs where I can work evenings and nights but the better paying opportunities are almost always morning shifts. My inability to wake up early was a big reason I dropped out of college. Now things are so bad I've had to leave work early multiple times cause I can barely keep myself upright. If anyone has any clue what it might be please let me know. I'm so desperate to fix this. It's very disheartening when even your doctor admits to having no clue how to help you.