Underactive Parathyroid Glands

Something in you can no longer hold. Not in the figurative sense — but literally. Your parathyroid glands, four small organs at the back of your thyroid, are producing too little parathyroid hormone. And with that, you lose the biochemical key that ensures your body can regulate its most important substance of firmness: calcium.

What you feel is not trivial. A tingling in your lips, in your fingertips, in your toes. Cramps that appear without warning out of nowhere — in your hands, in your calves, sometimes in your face. A strange overexcitability of the muscles, as if your entire body were under current, as if every fibre were just waiting to contract. In extreme cases: tetany, that peculiar state in which the hands cramp into a claw position and will not release.