McCall McPhersonFounder, Modern Thyroid Clinic.

Graves' Disease Diagnosis Story #shorts

9 Sept 2026 · 2 min

Watch on YouTube

1:45

In this first‑person YouTube Shorts narrative, the speaker recounts a multi‑year medical odyssey that began with sudden severe anxiety, panic attacks, heart palpitations, sweating, shakiness, and an urgent need to leave class. Over the next year and a half she experienced rapid, unexplained weight loss, dropping to about 90 lb, prompting friends to suspect an eating disorder. Doctors misattributed her fatigue to a heavy schedule and even prescribed Adderall, which she notes is dangerous for someone with cardiac issues. She later suffered a thyroid storm, with a heart rate soaring to 181 bpm, a life‑threatening event. The turning point arrived when a long‑time doctor, an endocrinologist, checked her pulse and immediately suspected Graves' disease, confirming it with tests. This diagnosis triggered a cascade of additional symptoms and further medical evaluations, some of which she accepted and others she questioned. The story highlights the challenges of misdiagnosis, the importance of contextual medical history, and the impact of Graves' disease on physical and mental health.

Chapters

I would go in and say, I have these really weird symptoms. Like, I have severe anxiety all of a sudden and heart palpitations. I'm sweating and shaky, and I feel like I'm gonna be sick. I have to get up and leave the class, and I don't know what's going on. And he's saying, these are panic attacks because you've taken on a huge schedule and you need to relax a little bit. Right, okay. So then I was losing weight rapidly, which at the time I was like, oh, okay, so I don't really have to work out. I'm in college. I can do whatever I want. I'm losing weight. But actually I was down to 90 pounds and my friends were saying to me, do you have an eating disorder? We're really worried about you. So again, back to the doctor, metabolism changes. I don't really know. There wasn't really a reason for it. And so this went on for about a year and a half. And you will probably think this is crazy, but it is unfortunately how it went down. The doctors ended up prescribing me Adderall for the fatigue. For those who are not watching this, your mouth and jaw drop because you understand the implications of that on the heart as well. I had gone into thyroid storm before. And it's very dangerous because my heart rate was so high. When I got diagnosed, it was 181 per minute. And ironically, finally the diagnosis came when I was back home and I saw a doctor who's known me my whole life. So she had the context and she was just like, all right, what's going on here? And all she did was check my pulse of all things. And she happened to be an endocrinologist and she said, You have Graves' disease. Let's test it, but you have Graves' disease. And so it was a crazy journey. And ultimately that was the start of what then was like a cascade effect of so many different symptoms and so many like diagnoses thrown at me, which I sometimes adopt, sometimes I'm like, I don't think that was a thing.