My numbers were posted today and while they’re not bad, they’re not good either. My TSH is up to 10.61 from 8.35, and my T4 is down from 1.4 to 1.1. 

I’m not surprised, as frustrating as this is. Just had a bad feeling, and I’ve also been a little more hypo lately... dry skin that goes beyond being older and living in the high desert, dry hair that breaks off or falls out, feeling cold at times even when it says it's 77° in here, struggling to keep my weight down, feeling lightheaded at times... 

I can live with being overweight, but I do NOT want to get obese. Might not have much choice in the end, though. Hashimoto’s controls us more than we control it in some ways. I just wonder how many more years my antibodies are going to have these anger issues with my thyroid and feel the need to bully the thing as much as I bullied my poor classmates in grade school. 

What scares me the most is knowing that the doctor’s going to want to bump me up to 88 mcgs. Tom doesn’t think I have anything to worry about, but I’d worry about all that horrible heart-pounding anxiety returning. It was literally artificial terror and not something you can just “turn off” at will, no matter how much you may come to understand what’s going on. It’s like smoking a joint and trying to tell yourself not to feel high. So telling yourself to “calm down” when you’re adrenaline’s pumping simply isn’t an option. 

Tom saw next door’s walkway when he was out watering earlier and said it looked like Bob finished it while I was on nights. Hopefully, he’ll take a few months off before the next project. 

My dreams were negative last night. Perhaps a sign of the bad number report? The only neutral one was a voice message from Bob P, who I knew when I lived in S Deerfield, MA in the '90s and who died in prison in 2006. I don’t remember what he was saying, though. 

In another dream, we lived in a house that looked nothing like ours (as usual), and for some strange reason, I had fallen asleep on the floor by the front door. I was suddenly startled awake by the sounds of someone just beyond the door, and my first thought was that Tom had come home from work. Then I realized that they were making this ongoing struggling sound that suggested they were trying to break in, and I remembered hearing about a rash of break-ins in the area. 

Torn between throwing the door open and surprising them or running out back, I decided my fists and my own anger issues would be worthless against any weapons, so I grabbed my cell and ran out back to dial up the bacon. 

Then I had another negative dream where I was told that we might have to rent a place. I knew this meant we were in the poorhouse again and could no longer afford to own. The strange thing was that I seemed to live with my mother and not my husband. I totally hated the thought of returning to the mainstream where you hear a helluva lot more than you do in a retirement community even on its noisiest of days, so I tried to look at the positives to renting instead. No having to pay for things that broke and things like that. I still wasn’t happy with the idea of renting.