I have some pretty amazing, shocking, hopeful and even scary news. I got up, did my thing in the bathroom, and was about to take dream notes which were quickly forgotten when I saw I had a message from Dr. A’s nurse. My first thought was, oh no! Already? It hasn’t even been 24 hours since I was at the lab!

I wondered if something could be wrong since I didn’t see how my TSH could still be in the teens unless something went very wrong with the gland itself. I called the nurse and she shocked the hell out of me by telling me my thyroid was better and that my TSH is now only 6.75 which is almost normal! My T4, which has always been normal, is at 1.4. This was quite a surprise but definitely a little scary because my TSH is only three points above when I had the last severe anxious reaction when my old endo tried me on 88’s two years ago. If my T4 hits 2.0 or higher, all hell could very well break loose, even though I’m feeling amazingly calm right now. It gives me hope that if I am through the worst of the perimenopause then I can one day have a normal thyroid without the killer anxiety. It goes to show, though, that while the medication itself has been a problem at times, the peri likely was a huge factor. The doctor and the nurse know, however, that if I feel any anxiety coming on I’m going to make skips. Fortunately, TSHs rise much quicker than they fall, so just a few skips can kick me up to the teens. So as long as I don’t let it get really bad if the anxiety comes on, I should recover within a week instead of a few months.

Dr. O wasn’t kidding when she said there was more going on than just my thyroid and the medication. Other factors like tachycardia, ADD, pocket flares and the perimenopause I didn’t realize I had gone into at the time. Levothyroxine is still a MAJOR stimulant and it’s a long-acting drug so some of us have to be careful.

A part of me wishes I didn’t know what my numbers are now because now I might worry at the slightest hint of anxiety, even if I know now I can just make a few skips to feel better. I just worry about getting anxious in the first place. Again, this isn’t the kind of anxiety one might feel if they’ve got to go to the dentist or something like that. It’s the most god-awful feeling in the world. The nurse said she didn’t think my TSH would drop any lower but I’ll be tested again in December.

I just try to remind myself that numbers are just numbers and it’s how I feel that matters. And also that it’s the same shit my body makes anyway, and I was normal once, after all, and even below normal when I had Graves’ disease. I just didn’t have the peri going on at the time and I was a lot younger, so I’m still a bit nervous about it. Especially after that nightmare, I had a couple of nights ago.

I was so excited, happy and amazed that despite the part of me that’s a bit worried, I balled my eyes out when I hung up from the nurse. All I could think was OMG, after three years of hell my thyroid is almost normal with NO anxiety. Yay!

So excited was I that I decided to call Tammy and give her the good news. While she was no doubt thrilled for me, I could tell something was wrong. I could hear it in her voice. I’ll get to that in a minute but first, I asked her if she thinks I’ll get any more periods, and she said I might get a few more spotty ones. Well, I’m definitely not going to get my hopes up too high and assume I’ll never get another period and that I’ll never be anxious again. I may have broken my period record, but not my anxiety record yet. I’ve only been able to go 4-5 months without anxiety. It hasn’t even been a month yet since I had to make my last skip on September 21, though it has been since July 5 since I ran for the Lorazepam. I have to make it to next spring without anxiety before I can really start to see the first ray of light.

There’s a 75% chance that it’s going to rain tonight, so hopefully, the roof won’t leak. Tammy said she heard it’s going to be a dry winter for us and Tom said he heard the whole country is to have a mild winter. I sure hope so!

So Tammy and I talked, even with Alexa thinking I was telling her to blast some rock music for the occasion. I had to jump up and shut her up, LOL.

Tammy describes her life as a “living hell.” I keep hoping that things will get better for her, but her surgery was a bust and they’re now totally sure she has Sjogren’s. So that makes three autoimmune diseases that are all a hell of a lot worse than Hashimoto’s and harder to treat. When I asked her how she lost weight it wasn’t any special diet she went on but that she simply doesn’t want to eat. In fact, she has eaten so little that she almost went into her second diabetic coma. The only good thing she had to report was that her heart is holding steady. So that much is good.

Becky has had tremendous pain in her jaw and arm, and they were both furious, understandably, because the surgeon didn’t suck out her lungs properly and she ended up with bleeding and severe breathing problems. I guess she’s going to be going on partial disability or something like that because she’s not going to be able to return to work as soon as expected. Sarah, on the other hand, is working like crazy to help make ends meet. I was so glad to hear that Tammy would move Becky in with her if worse came to worse. Our mother would NEVER have done that for us if we were in the same situation and of course, Dad would have gone right along with her decision.

Tom and I will still likely leave California someday to live in Florida. I won’t be able to help out all the time because of my CRD, but I’ll certainly do my best with things like cleaning since I don’t drive and I’m not much of a cook. It’s a lot cheaper there, and I can see where condos like what our parents had would be much quieter being on slab foundations with cement walls built to hurricane standards, whereas the elevated duplex we once lived in with elevated floors and wood walls meant you heard and felt the neighbors easily. We would still likely get a manufactured home similar to this, though, not a condo.

I’ll miss the neighbors and it’ll be a pain to get established with new doctors, but I can do that and meet new neighbors. The only thing that may be hard to give up would be Kathleen depending on what happens there, which I still think will be nothing.

When she told me Mark was going to be the shooter at the nursing home he works at, I was like, WTF? They’re going to be doing a drill on how to handle things if there were ever an active shooter. Only the local bacon department as well as the top staff know what’s going to be happening. That ought to be interesting but I would think that might be a bit traumatizing for some people as well.

There’s more I could say but I’m pretty tired tonight. I didn’t sleep much better the last time around. Hopefully, I’ll get my energy back soon because I’m missing too many days of working out. I’ll go force myself to do some Bowflexing now after sending a group “hug” to Tammy and the girls.

First, I don’t remember the dreams I had last night but I remembered a dream I had a few nights ago. In fact, I’m thinking of creating another PB account (anonymously) to share dreams as if they’re real-life events, LOL. Especially since I now have a tracker I can hide. If I share more stories, however, people will know who I am. I can’t do that anyway if I plan to publish most of them.

The dream took place at Valleyhead again. What is it with all the VH dreams lately? The only difference was that instead of a mansion we were in cabins. We were the ages we are now, though, and not young again. There were four of us per cabin. We slept in pairs on two double beds. I slept on the bed on the right on the inside by the nightstand. Not sure who my cabinmates were or why I was even there. When I spotted Tom out the window who had come to pick me up one morning, I scrambled to get dressed. Then I realized my paper journal was missing. I quickly went to look for it and then realized I had no pants on and wasn’t fully dressed after all.