Twenty-five years of being told I was fine

I want to write about something that almost killed me, because I think there are men reading this who are exactly where I was, and nobody told me what I want to tell them.

For twenty-five years I was tired. Heavy. Couldn't grow a proper beard. Cuts and scrapes that should have healed in a week took a month. Heartburn that lived in my chest like a tenant who never paid rent. Eyes getting worse year by year. I had been overweight my entire life — didn't matter what I ate, didn't matter how hard I trained, didn't matter how clean I lived. The needle wouldn't move. The diagnosis I got was depression. Take these pills. Try harder. You'll feel better. I didn't. I walked around for a quarter of a century thinking this is just what my body is. This is what being me feels like. Some guys get it easy and some guys don't, and I drew the short stick. So you push through. You build a life. You raise a kid. You teach your trade. You don't complain because nobody wants to hear it and the doctors keep telling you nothing's wrong.

Then at forty-six, my body said no.

I was driving home from work. Out of nowhere — chest pain like someone had parked a truck on me. Cold sweats hit instantly. My vision started fading to white. I had just enough left to get the truck pulled over before I lost consciousness. The diagnosis they gave me was pericarditis. Inflammation around the heart. Back to work in four weeks. They added three more blood pressure medications and an internist to my chart. By that point I was on something for blood pressure, blood sugar, cholesterol, depression, heartburn — the whole list. I couldn't walk to the end of my driveway without sucking wind. A trip up the stairs put me in bed for half an hour. The bloodwork was “normal.” The angiogram came back clean. So according to medicine, I was fine. I wasn't fine. I was dying slowly and being told to be patient.

I did everything they asked. Cleaned up the diet. Cut alcohol. Cut sugar. Cut carbs. Took the pills on schedule. Walked when I could. And I felt worse. I figured this was what getting old felt like. I was forty-six. I shouldn't have been thinking that.

Five months later, now forty-seven, it happened again. Different setting, same pattern — vision fading, world going gray. I had enough sense to call the ambulance on myself. Blood pressure came in at 198 over 124. I was on four medications meant to control it. The doctors called it a fluke. Tests normal. Sent me home.

That was the day something shifted. Not physically — I was further gone than ever physically. Mentally. I stopped trusting the word “normal.” I stopped accepting “we don't know.” Because I knew. I knew my body. I knew this wasn't aging and this wasn't depression and this wasn't a fluke. Something was wrong, and I was either going to find it or die looking — and at the rate I was going, dying looking was the more likely outcome.

I pushed my internist for an endocrinology referral. My A1c was 7.4. I had quit sugar. I had quit alcohol. I had quit carbs. There was no version of my lifestyle that should have produced a diabetic A1c. None. So either my body was broken in a way nobody had bothered to look at, or I was being gaslit by my own bloodwork. Six months on the wait list. Thanks, Canadian healthcare.

That waiting period was the worst of my life. Off work. Couldn't function. The body pain was constant — deep, grinding, in everything. No energy for anything. Blood pressure stayed high no matter what we threw at it. Any kind of stress — heat, cold, an argument, bad news — would set off a sweat and a crash. I'd pass out periodically for no reason I could explain. I was in bad shape. I knew I was in bad shape. And the system kept telling me I was fine. I want to be careful here, because I don't want this to read as bitter. The doctors I saw weren't bad people. They were doing what the system trained them to do, looking at the markers the system told them to look at, and ruling out the things the system told them to rule out. The problem wasn't malice. It was a frame that didn't include what was actually wrong with me. And the cost of an incomplete frame, when you're the one inside it, is your life.

The endocrinologist visit lasted forty-five minutes. He pulled up the same bloodwork the other doctors had been looking at for years and started flagging things immediately. Things that had been there. Things that should have been seen. He ordered an MRI and a stimulus test on the spot — and once those results came back, he had me on treatment within three days. About a month from the first visit to the first shot. The diagnosis was adrenal insufficiency. My body wasn't producing the hormones it needed to function. The MRI found the cause — a cyst on my pituitary gland. The pituitary is the gland that tells the rest of the endocrine system what to do. Mine wasn't sending the signal. So my body had been trying to operate without the chemistry it needed, going back to my late teens. The cyst gets monitored every year now to make sure it isn't growing. So far it isn't.

By the time treatment started, I was one bloodwork point away from dialysis. My liver was on the edge of permanent damage. My kidneys were failing. The “depression” had been my endocrine system collapsing in slow motion for twenty-five years, and the depression diagnosis had been the lid we kept screwing tighter on a pot that was about to blow.

Two hours after my first treatment, something happened that I will not forget for the rest of my life. I felt like a man in his twenties. I'm not exaggerating. I'm not embellishing. I sat there and the fog that had been my entire adult life lifted. My body — the body I'd been fighting and apologizing for and dragging around behind me — felt like mine for the first time since I was a kid. I cried. I'm a six-foot-five HVAC instructor and I sat there and cried, because the math hit me all at once. Twenty-five years. A quarter of a century. Spent thinking that was as good as it got. Spent thinking I was lazy or weak or broken or just unlucky. Spent thinking that's just my life. It wasn't my life. It was a missed diagnosis. And the difference between those two things is everything I have now.

From that first shot, I lived. The weight came off. Roughly a hundred pounds in the first year — not because I changed what I was doing, but because my body was finally working the way it was built to work. The eating, the movement, the time-restricted feeding — I'd been doing those things for years. They didn't work before because the underlying machinery was broken. Once the machinery was working, the same inputs produced completely different outputs. That first treatment was November 2024. A year and a half ago now. The work since the first year has been the slower kind — building back muscle, rebuilding stamina, learning what my body can actually do when it has what it needs, dialing in the protocol with my endocrinologist. Another twenty-five pounds has come off in the time since, and the needle is still moving. My A1c is 5.3. My blood pressure runs 120 over 78, sometimes lower, on no medication. My weight has gone from 389 pounds to 264 and is still dropping. The chronic pain is gone. The medications are gone. Two shots a week, for life. That's the deal, and I will take it every day until I'm in the ground.

What I want to say to any man reading this who is somewhere in the version of the story I was in: you know your body. Nobody else lives in it. If your gut is telling you something is wrong and the bloodwork keeps coming back “normal,” that doesn't mean you're imagining it. It means somebody isn't looking at the right thing. The frame is wrong. And the longer you accept the frame, the longer the actual cause sits there untouched. I am not anti-doctor. I am alive because of doctors. The endocrinologist who flagged my labs inside an hour is one of the most important people in my life now. But it took me getting to the brink — two cardiac events, kidney failure, a year off work — to land in front of him. None of that needed to happen. The information was on paper the whole time. It just hadn't been read by the right pair of eyes.

There is grief in this story too, and I want to name it before I close. I lost twenty-five years. I'm not going to get them back. There were years I was too tired to be the husband I wanted to be. Years I was too foggy to be the father I wanted to be. Years I told myself I was just a quiet guy when really I was a guy whose body was eating itself. I think about who I might have been with a working endocrine system at twenty-five, at thirty, at thirty-five. I'll never meet that guy. He didn't exist. What I have instead is now. Forty-nine and counting. A son who's getting the version of his dad that can run, that can wrestle, that can chase him through the yard without sitting down halfway. A body that heals when it's cut. A mind that's mine.

Beyond the grief, there is a particular silence that men fall into when their body is failing and the system keeps saying it isn't. You stop talking about it because nobody has anything useful to say. You stop pushing because pushing feels like complaining. You start to suspect the problem might just be you — your discipline, your willpower, your character. That is the silence I want to break with this piece, because that silence almost killed me, and I know I'm not the only one in it.

I'm writing this down because I would have given anything for someone to have written it down for me, twenty years ago. If you are tired in a way that doesn't make sense for your age. If your bloodwork keeps coming back “fine” and your life keeps getting smaller. If your doctors keep telling you to try harder. Push. Get the referral. Get the second opinion. Get the third. Find someone who will actually look at the whole picture instead of ruling out the parts they were trained to look for. Ask about your endocrine system. Hormones run almost everything that matters — energy, healing, weight, mood, sleep, blood pressure, blood sugar — and the endocrine system is the one a lot of GPs don't reach for first.

Two shots a week. That was the difference between the life I was about to lose and the one I'm living now. Don't give up. And don't take “normal” for an answer.