I’m not sure what happened earlier. All I know is that I woke up to pee after 6 hours of sleep and then got back into bed. I lay there for a while and eventually dozed off. Not long after that, I woke up feeling like I was suffocating. I had been lying on my stomach, and when I woke up, not only did I feel like I couldn’t breathe, but my heart was pounding as well. I was a little warm but not drenched in sweat. It wasn’t like when my heart would race me awake during perimenopause, and I didn’t feel anxious either. I’m not sure if my face was pressed against the pillow in a weird position or if it was the sleep apnea they tell me I have. I later took a nap without any problems.

In the book I’m working on, I have a fugitive who’s hospitalized for a while, and in a dream I had, she was waking up in the hospital. The room was somewhat dark, but she could just make out the shadow of her probation officer sitting in the corner of the room, staring at her in strange silence.

In another dream, I was playing the piano.

In the last dream, I started opening a door and found a lioness standing there, looking at me curiously. I tried to close the door, but suddenly it wouldn’t fit in the frame. There was a one- or two-inch gap on both sides, so I couldn’t shut the door. With no choice but to let the door fall to the ground and hope the lioness wouldn’t come after me, I struggled to open an inner door right next to it but couldn’t get it open.

Recently, I’ve woken up four times down a pound, at 158. Unless there’s something else going on that I’m unaware of, my new dietary plan is more effective than I expected. I’ve always known sugar and excessive carbs weren’t good, but I didn’t think cutting sugar out and back on the carbs would make such a difference, even if it’s just a pound. A pound is a big deal for someone with Hashimoto’s, especially since I hadn’t seen that number for so long. I hope I’m not losing muscle or anything, and I really hope my A1C is down when I get tested in December.

The only thing that doesn’t make sense is, if my weight is down because my TSH is going down, why am I still so cold at times? And if my TSH isn’t going down, then why is my weight down?