The appointment with my new endocrinologist went well, yay! She was very nice and way more informative than any other doctor I’ve seen so far. Finally, after all these months, I have learned what happened to me last summer. It makes me even more resentful of Doc C and especially Doc D for not warning me beforehand and explaining things to me better. Instead one told me to keep taking a dose that was too high for me while the other wanted me to go to a shrink. From what I read online, though, it is actually quite common for doctors to tell patients having the same symptoms I was having that they’re just anxious. Even if some of us know our bodies and what’s normal for us, and that suddenly becoming insanely anxious when life is better than ever certainly isn’t normal for us.

So why did my heart suddenly take off booming and send me into 4 months of the anxiety from hell? I probably had what’s known as pocket flares. This is the first time I’ve heard of the things, and had I known about them beforehand and that they’re not dangerous, I may not have freaked out so much and been so traumatized.

I thought that the thyroid died off as a whole and that what may remain active pretty much stays that way once you start medication. Wrong! The thyroid dies in pockets. She could actually feel them when she “strangled” me. Should one of those pockets flare up while you’re on a higher dose, that’s what can cause the God-awful effects I was having. It will take 1-5 years for my thyroid to die off completely as the active pockets burn out. It’s a slow burn, which means that I could be years away from getting my dosage settled, and as she said, which is the only bad thing she told me, it could happen again as they slowly increase my dosage. But instead of telling me to keep taking something that’s making me feel like I’m going to die and telling me to come in to see her either right now or in 3 months, she will care enough to get me in for blood work right away so that they can get me more comfortable ASAP.

I can’t believe the other doctors didn’t know what was going on. Why they didn’t want to deal with it correctly, though, is beyond me. My old endo sent a letter saying she was relocating to SoCal (like I care), so maybe she knew last spring and just didn’t care to really invest in her patients. As for Doc C, she was just young and inexperienced, I guess.

Back when I first started having problems last summer and thought I had accidentally double-dosed, I also didn’t know that even if I had, it wouldn’t have hurt me because of the way levothyroxine takes time to build up in the body. It takes 2 weeks for the T4 to settle in which is how much of the thyroid hormone is in your blood, and 6 weeks for a proper TSH reading, which reads how well your thyroid meds are doing what your thyroid can no longer do on its own. She’s still waiting on the results of my last blood test but expects to have me bumped up to 50 mcgs. After that, rather than just jump me to 75 mcg, she may go somewhere in between and see how I do on that.

I stressed to her how horrifying it was to have my heart booming and the other symptoms I had, which were caused by the extra adrenaline being pumped through me, and she noted that I was now traumatized by the ordeal. She then explained how she once accidentally bashed her thumb with a hammer and how it hurt to write without lifting her thumb up. Several months after the pain had stopped she was still raising that thumb and said to herself, “Why do I still have my thumb up?”

I get her point, LOL. In other words, put my thumb down. I feel like I’m in good hands now, they’re watching me, and they’re not going to brush me off and make excuses for me should I experience problems again. I just hope the rest of my thyroid dies off real fast so the risk goes away! To think I could have those problems over the next half a decade is a bit unnerving. But now I know that my body will continue attacking and killing my thyroid till it’s totally dead. The body creates antibodies when it thinks you have a disease (my dumb-ass body thought my thyroid was a disease) and begins to attack and destroy, which is what makes it Hashimoto’s, an autoimmune disease.

The good news is that my thyroid is not enlarged like I feared it might be and I should never need it removed. I guess I also won’t have to have ultrasounds every 6 months either.

She didn’t press on my stomach as the other endo did, but she did one of those reflex tests on the knee to make sure there was no nerve damage from the thyroid itself, and there isn’t.

She also had me hold my hands straight out in front of me like the other one and asked about my skin. I told her it was a bit dry, and of course I always have ridges in my nails, too.

She asked about hair loss as she gently tugged on it. I told her it stopped falling out as much, and she said it still comes out easily. LOL, yeah, I’m sure I’d end up bald in a good hair-pulling fight. It’s still a bit thin by my forehead, too. It appears thick overall, though, because it’s curly. It used to be insanely thick, but between age and this disease, it definitely has thinned out.

I first thought, even though I felt a bit overwhelmed by the initial diagnosis, that this would be a simple disease. I thought it would be as simple as taking a pill every day and that all would be fine. Instead, it’s a nasty, complex disease with potentially terrifying effects that takes time to tweak and fine-tune.

She was funny a couple of times. First she guessed by my accent that I was from Minnesota and then from New York. When I told her I was from Massachusetts, she told me she lived there for a couple of years.

Another funny thing was when she said, “You’re not crazy. You’re not old.”

Well, Doc C sure thought I was the first one, haha. She was so nice and so good-looking otherwise, but being competent is much more important than looks and niceness. Of course no one wants anyone who comes off as compassionless as Doc D did either.

I have really come to realize just how selfish Andy is. Ginger is this woman who lives in his complex whom he describes as being lonely and talkative. He said he’s been avoiding her phone call because she does nothing but “talk senseless shit.” In other words, she won’t let Andy do the talking or at least talk about what he finds interesting. That would be my guess anyway. In a way, I can relate to him. After all, I did recently blow off calling Paula because I don’t want to hear her ramble on about the same old shit and not let me get a word in edgewise.

That’s not it, though. I mentioned having to see my endo and do I get asked how it went? No, of course not. Instead, it’s all Andy, Andy, Andy. He’d be all ears if it had been a Stevie Nicks concert I’d attended, but being about something he can’t relate to and doesn’t care about, it’s all about his life on Facebook instead.

I don’t know what he sees in Facebook now that he is able to get back on, but isn’t allowed to “like” or post anything. All he can do is send messages. He’s going to Florida in a couple of days for 4 days, but says it’s going to be raining there the whole time and expects to be on the Kindle just as often. As fun as he may find Facebook, it’s still too bad that he can’t be busy doing things he doesn’t normally do when he’s at home.

Later…

We’ve got a light rain going out there right now, but even so, the landscapers were around earlier, and shortly after 10am, as is obviously the new daily tradition, the fucking cock down the street started up with the circular saw and I’m sure it will be an on and off thing till sundown. I’d love to complain to the office about it. But A, I know they won’t do shit about it and will just call it regular daytime noise he has a right to sic on me, and B, I don’t want them to spite me for it somehow. As I once learned the hard way… complain about someone and you just may be brutally surprised by what nasty connections they may have. It would take the whole block to complain about him for it to be stopped and that certainly isn’t going to happen. Just gotta get used to it, I guess, and get in the habit of putting the sound machine on by 10am. Just like I had to live with Jesse’s mutts, I will have to live with supposedly old and feeble people’s saws, hammers and other shit. Maybe it will back off in the summer heat. Until then, all activities requiring a quiet background like language studies must wait till nighttime.

I first considered the 3D printer a waste of money, but its fun and helpful possibilities are pretty amazing. Tom printed out a small shelf to put on the living room walls for his Wii remotes and controls.

Last night I had a dream that I was in some room and I heard them say on TV that some show that I had looked forward to watching was to be canceled that night. I don’t know if I was watching on a big screen TV or on a computer.

There were these two guys in the room with me and they made me uncomfortable for some reason. I quickly got up and went into another room and then to my bedroom, which was very dark. There were two doors to this bedroom and I shut one behind me as I entered the room and then reached through the darkness to shut the other one. I decided in my mind that if one of the guys asked me why I took off all of a sudden, I would just say I was sad because I missed my parents. But that is all I remember of the dream.

I had another wonderful daddy memory yesterday that randomly popped into mind. I was in my early twenties when he and some other guys helped me move into an apartment. I was trying to talk to him about how bothered I was by the way Mom treated me. Did I get any sympathy or understanding? No. Did I get told that he would talk to her? No, of course not. Instead, he had the nerve to tell me that that was his wife I was talking about, and if I kept it up he would walk away.

Yeah, he would choose his wife over his daughter, the fucking bastard. Really hope he and his precious wife are rotting in hell right along with their son. I have no more respect for enablers than I do the actual perps. That’s why I can’t stand God. I feel that He is just as much to blame for sitting back and letting it all happen.

I saw a documentary on third-world slums on 3 different continents, Asia, Africa and South America. It was absolutely horrible to see the pitiful conditions that these people live in. Even the worst slums in the US are heaven compared to these dumps. And no, they aren’t all lazy, drunk or on drugs, but more like unfortunate victims of circumstance.

Where my bleeding heart stops bleeding is over the fact that there’s no fucking excuse for the numbers to be so high as far as how many people are living like this. If they could just stop fucking breeding, the numbers of those suffering would drop drastically. It’s that simple. I just don’t understand these people, though. They may not have access to birth control, but a little common sense goes a long way. No, it’s not a hundred percent foolproof to pull out and not have sex at the most vulnerable times, but they could at least cut the number of people suffering down dramatically if they only thought of how cruel it was to be bringing kids into that type of a world in the first place and not just thinking of themselves only.

As for dumping Nutrisystem, OMG! I will never deal with those overpriced pushy assholes again. I called their 800 number and the nosy bitch kept asking me why I wanted to cancel. I told her that while most of the food was good, I have Hashimoto’s disease, so I’m not going to lose more than just a few pounds unless I nearly starve myself, something I don’t want to put myself through, of course, as it’s not healthy and it only leaves me feeling both hungry and tired. It seemed like nothing I told her was good enough for her.

Then she suggested talking to a counselor about diabetes and all that and I said, “Look lady, I said I had Hashimoto’s, not diabetes.”

Then she comes out and tells me that the amount we paid was for two orders and that if I chose to cancel now we would be charged an additional $84 for shipping and other things. I don’t remember seeing this written anywhere, although one such Nutrisystem member who has given me tips and pointers and advice in the past said that it is stated. I don’t know if it was written in such fine print that I was blind to it or if I just wasn’t paying much attention, but that doesn’t change how ridiculous the whole thing is.

I will return to eating as sensibly as I can and keeping active most days of the week. That is all I can do in my case. I’m 99 percent sure that I will never be under 145 pounds again in my life unless I am deathly ill, but the 20-30 extra pounds I’ve got won’t kill me. I will just use common sense and leave the rest to fate.

Writing prompts… My favorite Sunday ritual.

I didn’t really have a Sunday ritual as a kid or even as an adult. For the most part, I see Sunday as a day to relax, just like most people do. As a child, I would enjoy not going to school, and being able to play with my toys instead. As an adult, I enjoy having my husband home those days. Some days we do things together and other days we do our own thing.

Writing prompt… Holiday traditions I’ve looked most forward to.

I loved having my birthday and celebrating Hanukkah as a kid because like most kids, I loved getting presents. Even so, I think my favorite holiday was always New Year’s Eve. It was the one night I could stay up way past my bedtime and pretty much do anything I wanted. It was a tradition for me to watch the ball go down in Times Square, usually with my sister who was much older than me. I still watch it as an adult when I am able to. To me, New Year’s Eve always represented the start of a new year and new possibilities. It’s like wiping a canvas clean and then starting anew with a blank one.

Writing prompt… Things I did with my Dad when I was small.

Unlike my mother, my Dad noticed what interested me. Being much more patient and tolerant than my mother, he would take me to record stores to gather my favorite songs at the time and things like that. He would often get me magazines featuring my favorite celebrities too, while my mother couldn’t care less what I was into back then.

Writing prompt… Things I did with my Mom when I was little.

Most of the things I did with my Mom were to be forced to endure her constant criticism and negativity. I couldn’t really be myself around her. I had to be what she wanted instead. There really aren’t any activities in particular that I remember doing with her other than necessary tasks like her taking me to school and things like that. Nothing special in a really memorable way.

Writing prompt… If you could have dinner with anyone currently alive, who would it be?

I think I would have to say Alison, one of my closest cyber friends. It’s only a matter of time before I see my friends and family again, yet I have never met Alison and I think it would be really neat if we could meet, so right now she is the one I would choose to have dinner with.

Writing prompt… If you could live anywhere in the world where would it be?

Probably Hawaii. We stayed in Ka’anapali on the island of Maui and it was absolutely gorgeous. Not just the weather, but it had such a relaxed, laid-back atmosphere. The place was alive with color and everything about it seemed wonderful except for the costs.