Hypo Active

All right my lovely readers! :) An update is in order.

Still waiting on lab results for the hypothyroid business, but in the meantime, I am tracking my temperature and blood sugar levels to take to the follow up appointment.

I don't want to freak anyone out, but I might be a zombie.

My temperature (on different thermometers, so I know it isn't a thermometer problem) has averaged 96.6 for the past four days. As low as 95.9, and up to 97.3 at its highest.

95.9.

That is ridiculous.

The only explanation I can think of (besides hypothyroid) is that I am undead. I am not craving brains yet, but if I do, I'll let you know so that you can have time to run and hide from me.

Urrrghlll... RRRchhbbthbt.....

Or maybe I'm a vampire. Does that mean I have to read Twilight now, to learn more about my people? I hope not.

I have also been testing my blood sugar for signs of hypoglycemia (which is often a part of hypothyroid) and lo and behold I got several really low readings today( 55! 40!), and I was even eating very low glycemic stuff today - no sugar, no grain. On Thursday I am going to grit my teeth and do the orange juice test -- drink a glass of OJ on an empty stomach and test every 15 minutes to see what happens. I am guessing it will be kind of dire. Do not call me on Thursday morning. I do not pass out or get clammy when I have low blood sugar, but I do get really, really (really) mean.

All of this testing, with thermometers and glucose meters, makes me think how nice it would be if there were monitors for other things too, like Does This Food Really Fit My Diet or Am I Kidding Myself? or Am I Right or Wrong Right Now? We all know this scenario -- something happens and we have the opposite opinion of everyone else in the room. Or someone among our family and friends says something that seems horrifically offensive to us... but no one else notices. What if you could write it on a slip of paper, stick it in a meter, and get a readout about how out of line you are? What if it could even assign a percentage of rightness to each party?

SAMPLE SCENARIO IN WHICH THIS IMAGINARY DEVICE WOULD BE VERY USEFUL:

I am walking toward the front door of a business, carrying Norah on my hip and with two bags on my shoulder. A young man runs in front of me and goes through the door first. Rather than holding it for 2 extra seconds so that I can push it with my one free hand, he lets it slam in my face. Who is more out of line? Him for doing that, or me for getting mad about it?

IMAGINARY DEVICE SAYS: Him 15% right because he is late to work and has to make it on time. Me 85% right because my daughter is so cute. (Okay, so maybe the reasons would be a bit more scientific. But you get the idea.) I win, but not 100%.

What situations would IMAGINARY DEVICE help you out of?

Graffiti

Ruminating a little on the idea that I am probably hypothyroid, and finding it harder today to explain away the little nagging symptoms that I have been trying to ignore for over a year now. I am a hooded-sweatshirt-wearing preteen with absentee parents, a can of spray paint, and a big blank wall.

Am I exhausted, after doing nothing but driving around for three hours?

HELL YES I AM / I paint on the wall

Do my leg muscles hurt like I have run a marathon, although all I have done is drive and unload stuff from the car?

INDEED YES THEY DO / I spray, the paint dripping down from the letters

Am I angry that no other doctor or health professional even tried to find a solution to my problems, instead telling me that I am just tired because I have children, and fat because I have children, and in pain because I have children?

YES, yes, yes...

Do I wish I could have known this years ago so I could have nursed my children, remembered more of their infancies rather than drowning in exhaustion, and kept a house that I could invite people into, rather than one just full of clutter all the time?

mm hmm, yes.

I am not just tired today but I am deeply tired as a state of being, just tired of being a copy of a copy of a copy of myself, resembling the original but without the spark of life.

Putting aside the blame for the way that I feel, taking it off myself and taking the words like "lazy, slow, fat" out of my vocabulary, I feel like it's not too late to recover most of what I lost.

And now I have to wait 1-2 weeks for bloodwork to find out exactly what is wrong, and what needs to be done about it.

But hooray to have something to wait for at all! :)

Health Update

Just a quick update on my last post -- had a great appointment with the Integrative Medicine people. The ARNP talked with me for about ten minutes before the exam, and then she squished my neck and said, "Wow, your thyroid is really big. I can even see it, just looking at your neck."

She ordered some more bloodwork which will be back in 1-2 weeks, to find out what exactly is going on.

Very exciting! There could actually be something fixable/treatable there, rather than "general fatigue and malaise" that won't go away. Thanks to the ARNP for actually listening to me. There should be a medical school class about listening to people.

Hypoglycemiathyroidchondriac

It has been a while since I reported anything for us, because we have been so dang busy! :) I have started a new job (the tutoring job I mentioned earlier) so I am working about 30-35 hours a week, which is... a lot in conjunction with the other things that I do.

I also have an appointment with an "integrative medicine" doctor this week to see if there is anything actually wrong with me -- I have been to the standard MD for my general complaints, which basically go down the list of hypothyroid and hypoglycemia symptoms, but I have tested as "normal" for both of these things when sent to the lab by the doctor. So, since I need to function a little better these days (and also because I am just generally sick of feeling bad and being tired all the time), I am going to try again and see if there is anything to be found. I am actually hoping that they will find something, because I am all out of ideas. I just know that my friends can run circles around me and many of my friends in my weight loss group has surpassed me, while I am stuck, exhausted, and still 25 lbs above my goal, where I have been for months. I am hoping for a resolution or at least for a direction to go in.

The house is a little cleaner because Ben did a lot of cleaning while I was out of town, and I have been cleaning out closets as well. So that's going well.

And Norah is walking! On purpose, and on her own. I love the little Frankenstein lurch that she does :)

That's about all I have to report here. Cross your fingers for me and the doctor, and that even if there is really nothing wrong, that I can find a way to get back to myself again. Cheers!

Clearing Clutter

I got to clear the closets today. I sat in the floor with my trash bag, my scan-this box, my shred-this box and my keep-this pile and wept and laughed over 20 years worth of collected notes, school essays, notebooks full of terrible poetry from the year I was 19. I kept some things, threw some things away but was finally able to look at it all. Some of it is terribly poignant, like the cards from old friends who I don't know anymore, who write, "I'm so glad we'll always be friends!" Then birthday cards from relatives who have passed on, "I love you" in Grandma's precious handwriting, the little folded rectangular notes friends and I used to pass to each other between classes in high school. I still remember this one spot in front of Lincoln, which I passed on my walk from R1 to... where did I go after that? Inside the main building somewhere, and out front by the gum tree my friend and I would pass each other, nearly at the same spot every day, and we would hold the notes out and exchange them and learn about the other person's day -- who called, who flirted, who said what about whom and what we wanted to be when we grew up, that day. We watched different versions of Shakespeare adaptations and compared them, poured out our hearts to each other about what made us sad and what we hoped for.

I was very happy to find a poem about paper clips that I wrote in middle school. Sounds boring but I was very proud of it at the time (and I think still a bit now). It was something on the theme of how such a tiny simple thing can change everything -- some bent metal can bring order to a terrible mess.

And on that idea, the next part of the clearing which was the most difficult, which I have been putting off for about three years and ten months, going through the bag of preemie boy clothes and picking out which few to keep and which to give to the NICU. It's a particularly sticky issue because for some reason I have very little memory of what happened after we brought Chris home from the hospital, until about Christmas of that year, two months later. But when I see the little outfits, sometimes I will have a little spark of memory and I will remember him tiny and in my arms. Some of them don't spark anything at all, and those I put away to donate. But a few stick in my memory: A sleeper, ten inches from bottom to top, which was too big for him when we brought him home. A tiny, tiny stripey onesie. Somehow sorting through them and putting some away and giving others away is one of those terrible-but-necessary things. It felt good in the way that it feels good to break up with someone wrong for you -- overall it's good, but the doing of it still rips a bit.

It's hard to think of a good way to end this, but just to say that it's amazing how something that happens so quickly can change your life forever, and that the ripples can still be felt so far out on the water, miles from where the pebble dropped.