Great news. I’m now 99% sure I know what’s been causing my anxiety on and off these last four years. Is it my medication? Perimenopause? Yes, but no. The question is whether or not I can get someone to actually help me with it and that would be getting me a thyroidectomy, but first, let me get other things out of the way before I get into that.

Sure enough, I was woken up four or five times today but I’m not tired, strangely enough. According to the weather forecast, the motorcycles are going to be waking me up like crazy this weekend. :-(

I’ve woken up to sawing and hammering for three days now. First, they’re doing a project behind Geri and now Geri is getting a new hatch to her crawl space. I’m sure it will take weeks too. But as much as I bitch about it, I realize it might have been worse. I would have had to deal with it longer had I gotten up earlier. But then I would just escape to the bedroom. I’m thinking of making that my permanent office because I’m tired of noise running me out of the living room. I would hear less of the freeway in the bedroom, including the fucking car stereos that can be heard mostly from 6 p.m. to 2 a.m. in warmer weather.

Right after I removed Campus Games because it didn’t seem to shake Maliheh’s negative review (unless I just didn’t give it enough time to reflect the changes), someone bought a copy of Evil. Hopefully, not Maliheh or a friend of hers to show they can leave a negative review on something they actually buy. Not unless she has a friend in the UK anyway because that’s where the sale came from. Either way, if I’m going to keep making sales, then I guess I may as well leave my books up, even if I never make much money from it.

Last night I dreamed I was gazing out at either a large lake or an ocean I seemed to live by. The water was bedecked with many sailboats.

Then I dreamed I was in a bathroom in a place that might have been very close to if not right on the beach. For some reason, I didn’t close the bathroom door and Tom entered the room in which the bathroom was off of. I told him I was peeing and he said, “Oh, I’m not even looking,” and went about doing something in what might’ve been a kitchen.

Okay, on with the flareups that I’m virtually certain are what’s been causing me to have intermittent anxiety ever since I began this damn thyroid medication. It’s known as an autoimmune flareup. The more research I did last night, the more it explains a lot of things. I always forget that it wasn’t the medication itself because it’s simply the same stuff our bodies make anyway, but I knew it was awfully extreme for perimenopause. Not saying the peri isn’t to blame at all. I’m just saying I know my body and what’s normal for me and it’s been obvious to me that there has been something going on that hasn’t been properly addressed and dealt with. But as I read on, things started making more sense. For example, just the way skipping doses can help. If the problem was mostly on the peri, cutting the medication back wouldn’t give me such noticeable relief. I tell you, the symptoms are too severe to be simply a case of “bad” or “rough” perimenopause which would just keep getting worse and worse like when I didn’t cut back the first couple of years hoping I would simply “get used to it.” The severe arrhythmia and palpitations, fear and anxiety I never had before in my life, severe constipation, losing 10 pounds in a week… perimenopause alone doesn’t do this. The more I would let the flareups go on without cutting back, the longer it would take to get relief after finally cutting back. When I was at my worst the last time which was in the fall of 2015, it took me three months to recover.

Flareups involve a sudden burst of T3 which can cause you to have symptoms of thyrotoxicity without the numbers showing up on your tests. This is why I never appear to be overmedicated when they test my TSH and T4. From what I read, the burst of T3 doesn’t last long enough to show up in the types of tests that they typically do on thyroid patients. But still, when the article I read described the symptoms, I had them all. A racing heart, feeling flushed in a way that isn’t quite the same as when you have a hot flash, feeling jittery, feeling like you have “too much energy.” It was me. It was all me.

Lowering my dose would prevent the flareups from making me so anxious but it would also lower the amount of thyroid in my system more than it should. Well, I don’t want to be low on thyroid but I don’t want to suffer from this bullshit cycle anymore either. I really think my best option would be a thyroidectomy and eliminating the root cause of the problem is what should be done for me. The problem is that so many doctors want to take the easy way out and do what’s easiest for them instead of what’s best for the patient. If I can’t get A to help me, I might have to drop her until I can find someone who will, even if we have to pay for it ourselves. A thyroidectomy usually costs 5 to 7 grand. I’ve definitely had more than enough of this shit but if worse comes to absolute worse and no one wants to address and deal with the real culprit or even lower my dosage, I will skip doses when I have a flareup like I’m doing right now. Sometimes an occasional skip isn’t enough and I have to skip two or three days in a row.

I’ve read good things about thyroidectomies and never heard anyone say they regretted having it done. I think even Tammy knows someone who had it done and felt much better afterward, but again, because it’s not life-threatening, even though you sure feel like you’re going to die if it gets bad enough, I don’t know if I can get anyone to help me.

Dr. O actually told me what it was and she was the only one that brought up the flares. Not sure they ever go away, though, like perimenopause eventually goes away but I haven’t yet found anything that suggests they have any kind of set lifespan. As much as my Dr. O was a stern bitch at times that reminded me a little too much of my mother, she was a genius. Most knowledgeable and helpful doctor I ever had and I almost wish she was my PCP as well. I don’t understand why A hasn’t taken my complaints of anxiety more seriously and looked into other causes other than just perimenopause. I get that she hasn’t known me all my life and that she doesn’t live in my mind and body to know what’s normal for me and what’s not, but still. So many doctors want to take the easy way out and mask the problem rather than get rid of it altogether. I’m tired of this roller coaster and I don’t want to try to manage or mask it with things like Lorazepam and other things that could have side effects when I can simply remove the problem altogether. I know it would mean having to double my dose because I would be going from a 50% output to a 0% output, but this way I might actually be able to take the medication more consistently if I don’t have the damn flareups making me so miserable. Even the psychiatrist herself said you can sometimes still feel anxious even with psych drugs and these drugs can stop working after a while, too. So let’s prevent it from happening in the first place by going directly to the source and getting rid of the problem!

I ran and downed a couple of ibuprofen after reading an article about that helping with flares since it’s a form of inflammation, and psychological or not, it did seem to take some of the edge off the anxiety. I feel better today because I didn’t take my meds today and I’m not taking them tomorrow either so as to lower the amount of medication in my bloodstream while I’m flaring. I’ll take it on Sunday, though.