Saturday, June 14, 2014

The best path


I told the doctor to think of me as a nun.  She was doing the usual new doctor-y speechless gaping when told I am not, have never been, and have no plans to be sexually active.  My humor broke the awkward silence and allowed her to laugh and stop gaping at me while trying to form a coherent thought.  I should have said I was a free-agent nun.  I'll try to remember that line for next time.

I also said I was going to try to go off the thyroid med again.  I'm at half of the lowest dose, I have my eyebrows back, and I'm not losing copious amounts of hair right now.  I am ever-so-slightly less exhausted.  Part of me wants to stay on this ultra-low dose because it's working, but doctors keep telling me that if I do, soon my thyroid will get lazy (instead of just exhausted) and stop working altogether, and that's bad.  It's also, according to some doctors, probably not good to be taking the medication for a long time starting so young if I can avoid it.  But right now is not a good time to start losing hair and feeling even more tired.  I don't want to screw this up, but since I can't know what will happen this time I stop taking it, I can't know which choice will actually be more likely to screw things up.  Welcome to adulthood?

Since I've been tapering off the medication, I've been silently cheering my thryoid on.  "You can do it!" I tell it mentally.  "Go, thyroid, go!"  Now that it's had crutches for a little while, surely it can walk on its own.  Probably.  Maybe.  Eventually?  I think of it like the little thyroid that could, but in real life (outside of children's storybooks), sometimes the little train that thinks it can just can't.  Do I want the symptoms to return right in the middle of the stress of moving?  Can I trust my malfunctioning body to get this one thing right despite everything?  And if I do trust it, what if that trust is betrayed at the worst possible time?  But if I stay on the medication just until the moving is done (probably some time in August), what if that pushes me past the point of no-return, and, frustrated by my lack of trust, my thyroid locks itself up in its attic room and refuses to come out ever again?

Obviously, I could use more sleep.  (Most of the docs think that would actually allow the thyroid to function normally again.)  However, that's still the thing that just isn't happening here in my crappy apartment.  If I move to a place where I can consistently knock all the sleep-hygiene stuff out of the park, it's possible that things will improve.  If that doesn’t work, I may actually go to my last contingency plan (the one where I ask for, like, a three week supply of some drug that just totally knocks you out and then add that to the perfect sleep hygiene in a last-ditch, desperate effort to re-program my sleep [at least I'll have somewhere another person can sleep to make sure nothing wacky happens while I'm on that med]).  I'm pretty sure whatever decision I make will be the wrong one, but that just means that if anything works, I will be pleasantly surprised and very grateful.

Any thoughts?

Tuesday, March 25, 2014

souvenirs of the Fall



my shoulder blade rachets
over my out of place ribs
every time I reach upward
and am stopped short
by the pain