Everybody keeps telling me I’m going to get better, but I’m still waiting. Every now and then I think I see a shadow of my old self. I chase that shadow but it remains elusive. Ah, my old self. The one whose worst problems were earaches, allergies and a little dental pain. I really miss her. Well, my TSH may be better but my menopause certainly isn’t. 

After just an hour of sleep, I woke up (during a dream about us moving to a park that my sister and my nieces lived in) and overheated with my heart pounding just like I did on February 10. I’m documenting every torturous detail for my own reference as well as to possibly show my doctors. I can’t blame it on the higher thyroid dosage, though; because I wasn’t on 75 the last time it happened. I was on the 50s. Even my doctor said my thyroid isn’t my angel/devil. Other things can be going on. 

When it happened in February I was able to just get up, put the fan on and return to sleep a few minutes later, probably because Tom was home. Not this time, though. This time I was home alone and it took me over an hour to get back to sleep and I even had to take a lorazepam. I was trembling like crazy and my body felt like it was on fire even though it was cool in the house. The reason I didn’t take the beta-blocker was that my heart calmed down a few minutes later, and I was pretty sure that it was more about menopause than my thyroid or medication. I don’t want to reach for the rescue pills unless I have an underlying racy heart that just won’t quit. 

It is extremely frustrating and even scary having to deal with menopause and anxiety on top of trying to regulate my thyroid medication. It would have been nice if I could have done this one at a time instead of all at once. I’m in a shitty zone right now… Stuck in the middle of the transition. This means that I have hot flashes but I still have PMS and periods too, since they don’t just turn off like a light. So I basically have it all and that’s certainly no fun. 

On top of all this female shit, there is still the fear hanging over my head that the raised thyroid dosage may backfire on me. Even if the beta-blocker works if my heart gets out of control, I don’t want to keep suffering and then having to resort to the blocker, but nobody thinks I will have to so that’s good. 

My metabolism is undoubtedly speeding up. No doubt about it. This is both scary and exciting. If I can survive this dose without any problems this time around... bye-bye extra 25 pounds. 

I’m just afraid of coming full circle. The first time I was bumped up to 75 was around this time of year. Well, my metabolism is moving faster, my appetite is down, and I have to take more number twos. I fear that I will end up with the same severe anxiety just like last year. I hope to hell I am wrong, though! So far it looks like the Prozac is helping, along with the way we took a slower approach to upping my dose this time around, but there’s no way to know what the future holds. We can think we know and we can have our guesses, hopes and assumptions, but we can never know for sure until the future gets here. Well, I need at least three or four months on 75 without any issues for me to finally be able to relax and breathe a sigh of relief and think maybe I am finally home-free. Then I will just have the menopause and the anxiety to deal with, but the anxiety should lessen the longer I continue not to have any medication issues. 

The doctor was right, though; 50 mcg wasn’t enough. My metabolism was still too slow. I felt better than on no medication at all, but I was still retaining water, gaining weight easily, and having the driest skin and hair on earth. 

The exciting part is seeing my body treat calories like it should treat it. It doesn’t gain weight from a lousy 80-calorie yogurt and hold it for hours and hours. It may gain half a pound instead of a whole pound or more, but then if I don’t eat for a few hours my weight starts dropping like it’s supposed to. Before, however, it’d hover at the same weight even with hours of not eating anything. It was terrible. If I’m going to be overweight I want it to be because I eat too much and not because some disease is preventing me from burning calories properly. I don’t expect to be 100 pounds like I was when I was young, but being older and more solid I might get down to the 120s. If I don’t, it still won’t kill me to stay in the 140s. 

Where it got scary was when I thought it was going to keep climbing and climbing and climbing. At barely 5 feet tall there’s only so much weight I can carry. 

It was also scary watching it fly off at record speed like it did last summer. Nobody should lose weight that fast. 

Either way, I’m not naturally heavy and I’m not naturally inactive, so if the “side effects” don’t kill me, then I guess there’s a chance I may be buying new clothes one of these days soon enough. The most important thing is keeping my heart from feeling like it’s going to jump out of my chest. 

As for the menopause, I would really like to get rid of my memory foam mattress. They may be ideal for cold climates, but not California. I just don’t know what to replace it with since almost everything has memory foam toppers these days. For now, I will just use the cover sheet without the blanket, and I will continue to have the fan going. 

Another transition I’m stuck in right now is the weather. If you live where you have big high-low fluctuations like we do which averages 30° between night and day, you can literally need both your heat and AC at certain times of the year. The days are nice but the nights are still cold. 

I forgot to write about the slave bracelet. A few days ago the question of the day on Ask was what we wear for jewelry. Andy said a slave bracelet. Curious to see what one looked like, I googled it and found it was a bracelet with a chain that goes to a ring. I decided I wanted one, so I picked out a slave bracelet and also a slave ankle bracelet on Amazon. Hope my hands and feet aren’t too small, but eh, they were cheap. My survey change paid for them. I thanked Andy for mentioning that even though I couldn’t picture him wearing one and he cracked up laughing because he said he simply made it up. LOL