Last week I learned a little something about myself. It required blood work to make the discovery, so I suppose I should give some credit to the lab technicians and the assistant to my primary care doc who took my blood. The assistant was the one who called me back and left a message for me to call her. That’s how I knew that I would be learning something that wasn’t completely on the positive side. If everything is fine, they just leave a message, a tiny innocuous one about how everything looks normal and you probably just need to get some more sleep and stop being a baby (or having one in the house, whatever). But she told me to call her back. I knew it couldn’t all be good.
She’s a really young assistant and being around her makes me realize how old I am. She seems more like a high school student than someone who has achieved any level of accreditation, but she’s been working there for a few years now, so I suppose it really is just my crows feet clouding my view of her. She takes my vitals and all that usually, but I was kind of blown away with the idea that she was going to actually take the blood from my arm. Weights and temps and all are no big deal. Piper can almost handle those. But needles? They trust her with the needles. And the phone calls.
A couple of times over the past year I’ve had some kind of odd stuff going down but had pretty much chalked all of it up to pregnancy. If my eyes had started bleeding from Ebola, I’d have probably rolled over and been all “that’s pregnancy for ya”. Seriously. Nothing goes back to normal. And there is now another thing that isn’t right.
My thyroid.
I know, right? It doesn’t sound like that big of a deal. Isn’t it just the thing I’ve always wanted to blame for the extra weight I have carried around from time to time? Isn’t it a punchline? As it turns out, it is kind of a big deal and it is less funny than first glance. It is the reason I can’t concentrate, the reason I can’t stay awake sometimes, the reason I can’t fall asleep at others. It is the cause of this cystic acne that I loathe and the horrible harbinger of how hard this baby weight may be to take off. I’m planning to blame pretty much every single symptom of not feeling well on the stupid little gland and hope that once it all gets sorted out I won’t feel like trash anymore. It’s a lot of hope to put on one tiny body part. Here’s hoping it can live up to the hype. 
The assistant said I have severe hypothyroidism, but when I started reading about numbers and what the right range is and all I discovered that she either told me the wrong thing or she was telling me the level of something other than T4. An appointment next Friday will reveal all things, or maybe just the truth about my thyroid. In the meantime, I feel bizarro and there isn’t much help for it. If you talk with me, by phone or in person, just remind yourself that I’m not right and prepare to repeat yourself a lot. I can hear you just fine, I just can’t hold the thoughts in my mind for very long.
Thanks to all the people who have offered their advice and support and all. I appreciate it. Deeply.
[Wow. That last little bit there makes it sound fatal or something. Of course I know other people have much greater things occurring and my tiny little thyroid business isn’t really a brain tumor or some such REAL problem. I’m not sitting around trying to feel sorry for myself or anything. I know there’s a fix lying somewhere out there in synthetic hormones or surgeries or radiation or whatever, but all of that hasn’t made me able to sleep or escape insane migraines or relieved the pain in my face or made it easier for my heart to stop racing in the middle of a grocery trip that I had to abandon because of all the sweat, now has it? See that last part there? That’s the anger that flashes for no good reason. I am looking forward to feeling normal again sometime soon so that my flashes of anger will all be easily understood.]
