I slept 8 hours yet I’m exhausted. Tom and I both suspect my TSH levels are still off and so does the doctor, who also seems to think my primary doctor isn’t very competent since she didn’t follow up on some things. Yeah, I wonder about her too at times. 

I am feeling a bit frustrated and overwhelmed right now. The doctor understood this and said that hypothyroidism is common. Common or not, others suffering with me or not, it doesn’t lessen my own suffering. I’m tired, I’m sleep-needy, I’m losing hair, I’m gaining weight, and now I’ve learned that the memory loss I’ve been noticing is connected as well. It usually took just one take to learn foreign words when I was younger. Now it usually takes a few takes to get them to stick. 

I have several symptoms I wrote off to either age or being fat. I know our memory declines with age and I thought that and my low sex drive was on account of aging alone. They wouldn’t have so many sexual enhancers geared toward us older folks if we were all as horny as we were in our 20s, so I wrote that off as one more consequence of aging. 

My brain just isn’t as sharp as it used to be. I have to stop and think when asked questions that I should be able to answer in a split second. 

I also thought my puffy face and neck and swollen feet were on account of the extra weight, but those are symptoms too, as well as the water retention I’ve bitched about having at the wrong times of the month. If it’s a symptom of hypothyroidism, I’ve got it. She showed me a plastic model of a normal thyroid vs. one as fucked up as mine and it’s definitely a lot bigger than a normal one. No wonder I have such a fat, droopy neck. 

Being sensitive to heat and cold is another thing I didn’t realize was connected. I thought I just always hated the cold and had simply become less heat tolerant due to getting so fat. 

The doctor said it could take as much as 6 months to get my medication levels adjusted, and in a day or two, I will be having more blood drawn. She felt my thyroid and will send me in for another ultrasound in September to make sure those nodules are still benign. 

As Tom was pointing out and reminding me when we were discussing my weight, my 100-pound days are over. I have way too much muscle to get much under 120 and that’s fine. I’m not looking to get “skinny.” People associate thinness with being in shape when in fact the two aren’t as connected as people tend to think they are. When I was 100 pounds I was in shit shape most of the time. I could never have done all the ab crunches I can do now nor could I run a few miles. I have a close friend who is thin but she smokes and tires easily. So being thin does NOT always mean you’re in shape. Any expert will tell you this. Also, exercise alone isn’t usually enough to get the weight off unless you can do it for many hours every single day. You gotta cut calories and eat healthier foods. As I told Andy, what frustrates me more than not losing weight from exercise is knowing I have to damn near starve myself to lose more than a few pounds. It’s when BOTH exercise and diet fail to do you any good that it’s frustrating as hell. 

Tom believes I will eventually be able to lose weight, but I think I’ll continue to gain all of my life. This worries the shit out of me because I don’t know how I can get around being this short if I gain another 30-50 pounds. I’m at the point where I’m more worried about gaining more weight than I am about losing hair. I can still function with or without hair on my head, but I can’t function if I end up grotesquely obese. 

Another symptom I’ve had for a while now is an increase in both hunger and thirst. Well, it’s awfully hard to restrict your calories when you’re constantly hungry! Some days I just can’t fill up. I’ll have a sandwich or something and feel like there’s absolutely nothing in my stomach. Most days I can eat around 1500 calories, which is less than the standard 2000 most people are recommended to have, but to my body 1500 is like 2500. 

I also learned that while high cholesterol may run in the family, my thyroid is probably what drove mine up. The doctor’s going to test my pituitary gland, something I guess my primary was supposed to have done but didn’t. The pituitary sends out messages to the other glands to do their jobs, and she wants to know if there’s any communication going on there. If the pit gland is telling my thyroid, “Work harder! Work harder!” then that’s an indication that the TSH levels are still off. A failed thyroid will always continue to try to produce hormones it can no longer produce. 

Nothing frustrates me more than having to tell people the same shit over and over again. When they ignore what I tell them or don’t seem to get it, I often wonder if they pay attention to the things I say or if they even give a shit. Yet here I am having to ask people to repeat themselves because I failed to remember something they just told me. :( 

The whole thing just sucks. Appointments, pills… ugh! I feel I’m too young to have a chronic condition that requires meds for the rest of my life. I didn’t expect anything like this till my 60s or so. I also thought I’d live at least till my 70s so that God could have more fun cursing me with shit here and there, but IDK. Maybe the bastard will kill me sooner. I doubt it, though. 

A part of me is tempted to just not give in to this problem by just ignoring it completely and not going to doctors and taking medication, but that will only make things worse. As much as we may wish we could tell ourselves to just “not give in to” whatever, it doesn’t always work that way. I can’t wish this away, I can’t pray this away, and I can’t just ignore it. Ignorance may be bliss when it comes to not reading the depressing news, ignoring trolls, and many other things. But I don’t have the luxury of just “ignoring” my condition. Not without serious consequences. Within a decade I would probably have a heart attack or a stroke if those nodules didn’t turn cancerous first, and I hate to think of just how many hundreds of pounds I could gain in the meantime as well. So I can ignore the news and I can ignore certain individuals so long as they don’t come to my door and make me deal with them, but I can’t ignore my health. 

What’s up with the staff at this place, though? Everyone’s bald or anorexic. The receptionist had such thin hair she makes mine seem thicker than it used to be, and the doctor’s nurse was so skinny it almost made me sick to look at her. I’d rather stay fat than be that thin. Anorexia? A medical condition? My guess is a medical condition. Anorexia is usually a young thing and this woman was around 40.