well, i've been back to the naturopath's to see what the new bloodwork fairy brings...turns out a further, but not more helpful, diagnosis: hashimoto's thyroiditis (also known as "hashimoto's disease"). if you just say "hashimoto's" it sounds kind of exotic, add the thyroiditis and it sounds made up...call it hashimoto's disease and it sounds straight up too diseasy for my tastes. so, hashimoto's it is. it means my body is creating antibodies to attack my very own thyroid with--the average person gets a rate of 35, i have 1000. nice, huh? "they" (ie. doctors, medicos, etc etc) don't know what causes it, but it tends to be genetic and there are theories, as i mentioned before, involving all the toxins and pollutants in the environment--they really screw with your endocrine system in lots of nasty ways.
so it basically sucks. there is no cure, they just treat the symptoms--ie. the hypo-thyroid. though my doc did recommend trying a gluten-free diet, as a guy she took a seminar from earlier in the year has had great success with lowering the antibodies that way. so i have an incurable disease in which my body attacks itself from the inside AND i can't eat gluten. i bet you didn't think of it, but gluten can even be in BEER!!! so i can't even wallow with a cold one in a pool of pity and weariness. guess i'll be a wino, then. i'm trying the gluten-free diet for three weeks, starting probably sunday. then i get more bloodwork (to see if the antibodies went down), then i "challenge" the gluten-freeness by eating a bunch of gluteny things (come to me beer, let me make a sauce of you to pour all over my pasta!!!) yeah yeah logic logic...if it makes me feel better it's worth it blah blah blah.
it is so--make that SOOOOO--depressing to learn that your body is attacking its own self. if you think of your mind and body and spirit as a unit (you-nit, haha) then it's especially interesting (in a way that makes you want to drink a bottle of wine all to yourself and cry about what a failure you are) to think about the fact that you are attacking yourself. why? why would your mind/body/spirit do that? why can't you do anything about it? (whispered thoughts: can you do anything about it?!) if it's all connected, then couldn't you figure out why you're attacking yourself on an emotional/spiritual level, then resolve it, and then be all better?! medically, it does not appear so, though maybe deepak chopra would say different, i dunno. and this is where quantum physics always breaks down for me. even when every cell of my being believes in something, i cannot always "choose that potential"...so. hmph.
anyways, right now i'm wallowing. i always give myself a few days to wallow when REALLY bad things happen.
yeah, it's not cancer, it's not AIDS (though it does cause me to have a greater propensity for developing other auto-immune disorders), but it's big and sucky to me anyways, and i feel like crap about it.
now for the hopeful bits...my piggypill dose has been upped to 60 milligrams, so hopefully i'll finally start to feel some relief from the chronic, nagging, annoying, horrible fatigue. and...in my research and my discussions with the doc, i've discovered that many things are symptoms of hypo-thyroidism, things that i've been dealing with, but didn't really think of as symptoms...like dry skin ( i thought i just didn't eat enough fish!); ridged/cracked/brittle nails (i've had this one nail that always splits in the middle no matter what i do or how careful i am with it--for YEARS); weight gain, of course (new t-shirt idea: " i'm not fat and lazy, it's my thyroid!")--no wonder all those grueling curves sessions made ABSOLUTELY NO FECKING DIFFERENCE!, itchy skin (there is this spot on my stomach that has been bothering me since jubal was born!). stuff like that. i honestly think this was brought on by my pregnancy with VESTA! i've had symptoms that didn't seem like symptoms for that long! (she's ten now, by the way). the bitter irony--when i was dealing with the "breastfeeding issues" after she was born, clarebeth said something about "it could be a thyroid problem" to joe (her naturopath husband) and he responded with something about what good would it be to know that if there wasn't anything you could do about it--i guess assuming i wouldn't take the pills. maybe i wouldn't have then, who knows. but damn. i sure wish THAT path had been pursued at the time. sigh.
here's to pigs and oncoming relief and the resilient human spirit, which i hope i have somewhere in me.
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an excerpt from a work-in-progress
they ate breakfast together: an omlettle he made filled with spinach and cream cheese and tomatoes and a bagel they split with salmon and more of the cream cheese and some capers she went back to the fridge for. they amused themselves discussing what capers are and how they came to be in jars at upscale markets for them to buy and eat on bagels with salmon. he liked to think they came from the sea somehow, and she assured him they were really little berries of some sort of fragrant bush. she fished the capers out of the tall jar as they talked and ate more than usual, something about their brininess described a hunger for her that she didn’t know she had, and then filled it. they drank steaming mugs of rich coffee with cream (and two sugars in his). she loaded the dishwasher and wiped off the counter while he cleaned the coffeegrounds and little spills from the coffee pot. the sun shone cleanly into their white kitchen and onto their bodies as they moved about their tasks and then they kissed one another and left for work, him to an office in town and her upstairs to her office where she worked as a freelance ad designer. it was a perfect morning. it was the perfect morning.
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