If you know me, you know that in addition to Easter and Spring Equinox, I have bad luck with Mothers Day. Really bad luck. I suppose it's good to know that tradition continues, a continuity of sorts.
This year I spent Mothers Day, two days in fact, in hospital. Hospitals, for those of you lucky enough to never have been in one, operate (pun intended) on their own time schedule, in their own reality, of their own world. You lose track of reality faster in a hospital than falling asleep will get your veins poked.
I'd been feeling "off" for weeks--months or years now that I look back on it--and had just a week previously consulted with a friend in the profession. My main symptom was a pain in the neck accompanied with swelling. (I have very few truly skinny things on my body and the neck area is one of them. It's pretty easy to see when it isn't its normal size.) My friend did agree that there was some girth that hadn't been there before but didn't think it was too serious, which at that time, it wasn't. So I followed up with my NP and was pleasantly surprised when she ordered not just bloodwork, but an ECG and an ultrasound. But by the time I got the reports from those tests, I knew something was up. I couldn't eat ANYTHING for five days. This progressed to having a hard time swallowing clear liquids, which devolved into the inability to even drink water. I was breathy like a Texan who comes up to our altitude for the first time. Once the weekend arrived, I was in bad shape. I went back to the same friend, waking her early that morning. When she saw my neck, she struck a more serious facial expression than I associated with her. "We need to go to the ER now," was how she put it.
She drove me down the pass to one of the main hospitals in the Springs and helped me fill in the paperwork. I don't remember very much about the next ten or twelve hours, but I spent them in a private ER room (I remember the days when it was communal triage so this was a blessing) getting close to ten or twelve tests. I do not recall many of them. Eventually day became night and I was admitted. I spent that Saturday night into Mothers Day morning in a fog of aggravation and paranoia. It was hours before I was to know what was going on with me. But I could breathe, the pain was better, and soon I would be able to swallow again.
I have an auto-immune disease called Graves Disease. (Why Doctor Sexypants couldn't have discovered the disorder in the late 1800s is just my bad luck of the draw.) But, according to the late, great Mr. Graves, my thyroid gland has turned against itself, and thereby, me. And it turns out that the little butterfly in your neck is a pretty important little sucker. They don't call it "the master gland" for no reason. In a nutshell, the thyroid takes the energy you put into your body and tells every single cell you possess exactly what to do with said energy. Explains a lot looking back on my recent history. And during the three-week period leading up to what I experienced that weekend, a "thyroid storm", my thyroid was making me hyperthyroid to the point that I had unwittingly been in tachycardia for the entire three weeks. Kinda scary to know that now. My heart, and the rest of me, was on overdrive for a very long time. In retrospect, I'm lucky I didn't get myself into any trouble in that state!
So life goes on and so do the meds, for the rest of mine anyway, but that's okay. Taking four pills three times a day I can handle. Shying away from conversations and activities when I become overwhelmed I can carry out with a measure of grace. I'm even beginning to reclaim a somewhat "normal" energy level and have thoroughly enjoyed working in the yard and gardens this month. I'm also back to work at both of my doggie non-profits.
May was tough, Mothers Day was tough, but hell, that's par on my golf course. And if I keep taking my meds and keep having some of the best friends (both here and in this virtual world) on the planet, I'll be fine. I'll have life's averages of waining and waxing days, and I'll get some of things that make me the happiest accomplished. All will be as well as it can be.
(At least until the Fall Equinox, that is.)
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