I was falling asleep thinking how wonderful the weekend had been just to wake up an hour later with my heart racing. I thought I was over that shit! Why does the past love to return to haunt me and why have I been having these things? Did I just get overheated? Is it menopause? Anxiety? My medication? 

It raced really fast for a few minutes. Even my brain felt like it was sizzling or something, and I took lorazepam to help me fall back asleep. After that I was fine. I didn’t wake up a million times and I had no more “heart attacks.” 

I was in the middle of dreaming that Tom and I were on some boat or ship. I don’t think it was ours. A storm was brewing and he wanted to see if we could get to a particular place before it got bad so he opened a door to check the weather conditions out. It was very windy and cloudy so I told him to forget it. If my heart hadn’t raced me awake I probably wouldn’t remember that dream. 

The lady who lives diagonally from us with the double-door garage was having it worse. I got up at 2 AM and a half-hour later I was aware of car door slamming. My first thought was that it was next door. Wondering what the hell they could be doing at that hour, I looked out the window and saw fire and ambulance had pulled up to the other house. The woman was loaded into the ambulance and her husband followed in their car. 

Just got a notice from my endo doc saying: 

I am glad you are able to articulate all this more openly as I believe it is part of the healing process. We will GET to a good place in time with all of this. Let me think of next steps but certainly one is to help the anxiety calm down with medication that agrees with you. I will work with Dr A to help get you in for a medication evaluation with a psychiatrist. Once the anxiety is more settled I think we can tackle the thyroid. Hang in there! DR O 

So I Skyped Tom and asked him what I should reply with, and he said: 

No need to reply...they can talk all they want then we'll do what is best. 

As I sit here and mull her words around in my mind, I’m not sure what to think. I have mixed emotions about things right now and with good reason. I don't want to end up a walking pharmacy I was as a kid, but at least I have rights to my life now that I didn't have before. At 16 years of age, I simply couldn’t say “no” to any medication I didn’t want to try or that I didn’t like the effects of. Now I do. I don't want to treat anything physical or emotional unless it is absolutely necessary to my well-being. 

Again, I’m not sure a counselor, shrink and medication are necessary if they just give me the proper dose of thyroid medication. I never had anxiety problems this severe before, so why now, even though I happen to feel fine at the present moment? 

I appreciate the doctor not giving up on me and I appreciate her doing her job and trying to get me to a better place where I feel better and I’m healthier. I’m just afraid that their efforts may make me worse as the Prozac did. I don’t want to get worse trying to fix something that may be able to be fixed simply with the proper dose of thyroid medication. So I have mixed emotions like I said. I respect the fact that they’re the experts, but sometimes I think that maybe I still know myself best and that they’re getting a little too carried away. I guess time will tell. Either way, I definitely don’t want to go through the physical or emotional hell I have been through all over again, and I know there are no guarantees that I won’t. 

There are other fears as well. I became addicted to and acquired permanent side effects from the Navane I took many years ago. Well, I don’t want to become dependent on pills any more than I would on alcohol or illegal drugs and then suffer long-term consequences. So unless it is absolutely necessary, I don’t want anybody playing God with my brain chemistry too much. Yes, I’d rather get addicted than feel like I’m going to die, but if there’s a better, easier way, I’d rather that. 

I thought about it for months and finally decided that getting my hair straightened might damage my already damaged hair, and decided that I was sick of long hair anyway, so I cut it off. It’s not only easier to deal with and more manageable this way since it’s very curly and I have to dye it regularly, but it will make it easier for swimming season. 

I got it done at Supercuts and the girl did a great job. It’s to the shoulders with a slight layer in back to keep it from poofing out, and some face-framing. The whole thing took only about 15 minutes and when she was done she put some anti-frizz product in it that smelled really good. The whole thing cost just $16. 

Tom told me we could go anywhere I wanted and I could have any service I wanted. That’s really sweet of him, but I never saw the point in paying $60 for the same cut you can get for $16 whether you have extra money or not, and I guess we’re doing pretty well right now because we calculated that if he were suddenly jobless and didn’t get unemployment, we would be okay for 10-11 months. Either way, the prospect of ever becoming poor again seems like nothing compared to the physical and emotional hell I’ve been through the last year. 

Between bike riding and tons of walking through giant parking lots, I got a lot of exercise yesterday. The lady at Supercuts told us we had a 25-minute wait, so we walked to the nearest store, which was a dollar store. I got a cute Rainbow spinner to put outside, and this dangly thing with gems and butterflies to hang over the bar across the top of the bench swing to give it a little decoration. 

I felt a little flustered by the time we got back to Supercuts, so I decided not to go walking around Target across the way like we had originally planned and to just go back home and relax. 

With all we have going on, we decided to postpone Reno until the fall. We are still not sure when and where we will get a kitten, but I guess we can start looking around. 

So tell me… what’s the point of hiding our Facebook friends if Facebook is going to announce on the newsfeed that so-and-so is now friends with so-and-so? And why does Facebook need to recommend our friends to our other friends? I swear there is not one stitch of privacy on Facebook. If I post to one friend’s wall everybody else has to know about it and I don’t see why it’s their business no matter how trivial the post may be. Everything I “like” and comment on is pointed out to my friends, and while I don’t necessarily mind them knowing what I “like” and comment on, it still doesn’t pertain to them so it seems pointless. This is one of many reasons I continue to limit my usage of the site. I use it more to check for messages and collect pictures than anything else.