Skip to main content

A Breakup Letter to My Thyroid

Hey, Thyroid.

We've been through a lot together, you & me. For some twenty-five years things were pretty good. You formed when I was about 12 weeks old gestationally & did what you needed to do - helped me breathe once I was born, kept my heart at a steady rate, helped my body maintain a comfortable temperature, kept my weight where it needed to be, & eventually kept my periods regular (which was super awesome, by the way).

But then...you changed, Thyroid.

I don't know if you were jealous of my new appreciation for the other parts of my body after having a baby. Maybe you felt neglected, like I all of a sudden was more awed by my reproductive organs than I was by you & the rest of the endocrine gals. But, if I'm being totally honest, I had never given you any thought before. I took you granted, Thyroid, & for that I am truly sorry. But the way you behaved after my oldest was born was pretty extreme.

I guess I just got sick & tired of being, well, sick & tired. Of my heart feeling like a Mexican jumping bean, getting out of breath walking up the stairs of my house. Sick of my hands shaking like Gene Wilder's in Blazing Saddles. Sick of sweating in my sleep even when it was negative temps outside. Sick of my eyes feeling tired & dry all the time. Sick of my hairline threatening to move into George Costanza territory.

The worst was the fatigue & the emotional combat you waged. As if it's not tiring enough chasing after one, then two, then three boys, you had to make it so hard that I could barely stay up past 8:30 some nights? Really? You made me crazy. You made me depressed. You made me anxious & irritable & robbed me of the joys that should have come with the first year of my firstborn's life.

Sometimes you even made me want to die, Thyroid.

We just wanted different things. Sure, it was nice of you to help me lose that baby weight really quickly, but you went kind of overboard once in a while. I'd like to have more kids. You? Not so much.

So enough was enough. No more feeling like shit. No more drugs that mess up my liver. No more going on this drug for a few weeks, then switching to that one, then this dosage, then that one, then nothing. Then BOOM, gotta be back on it again. Additional drugs to help with symptoms, ones that scrambled my brain that I seriously considered checking myself into an in-patient institution a couple of times.

It was time, Thyroid. Time to head our separate ways.

I'm sorry it had to come to this. Really, I am. I'm sorry you had to be cut out of my life & my body in such a violent way. And I know that I'll feel your absence. I know you being gone isn't gonna solve all my problems. I know there are still going to be plenty of drug tests, co-pays, hoofing it to my endo's office, figuring out dosages, monitoring symptoms.

I hope you won't hold it against me. We had a good run. Twenty-five years of working versus five of going nutso isn't so bad, especially compared to what other folks have to go through. But...you know how it is; I've got a family now. They need me to be here, & not just physically. It was time to break-up, once & for all.

I hope you'll forgive me, Thyroid, just as I've forgiven you.

Love,
LK

P.S. I hope you like the cool scar that's been left in your place. I'll be sure to concoct an awesome story to go with it. I'm thinking something having to do with fighting off assassins.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Long-Winded

I am anything but brief. And I need to work on that. Lately I've been wanting to delve into the world of short stories, but I'm too monogamous - I can't create characters for a one story fling, I feel dirty and like a bad person. Stupid, I know, but sometimes us writer types are weird like that.  It seems like the only time I'm good at being brief is when I am (or, at least, think I am) being witty. You know, like in facebook statuses. I'm not the kind of person to write, "Ohh nooo all this snowww! It snowed like 2 feet OMG!" More like, "Today is the first day of April. It's been spring for about 2 weeks. It's fucking snowing." Or some random observation. Just spice things up a bit. Ok, I realize I'm tooting my own horn. I'll stop. The whole being brief thing has been bugging me (partly because I realize I don't know when to shut up and be concise when explaining things to people) as I've been editing and writing m...

"Death to high school English" by Kim Brooks

(Just sharing this article. Got it from Salon.com ) Like so many depressive, creative, extremely lazy high-school students, I was saved by English class. I struggled with math and had no interest in sports. Science I found interesting, but it required studying. I attended a middling high school in central Virginia in the mid-'90s, so there were no lofty electives to stoke my artistic sensibility -- no A.P. art history or African-American studies or language courses in Mandarin or Portuguese. I lived for English, for reading. I spent so much of my adolescence feeling different and awkward, and those first canonical books I read, those first discoveries of Joyce, of Keats, of Sylvia Plath and Fitzgerald, were a revelation. Without them, I probably would have turned to hard drugs, or worse, one of those Young Life chapters so popular with my peers. So I won't deny that I owe a debt to the traditional high-school English class, the class in which I first learned to read literat...

Loki, Season 1 - Review

The first season of Loki is done, but the good news is that a second season is coming...at some point! It's been a heck of a year for MCU fans, with all the new shows and movies that have already come out and are still on the docket.  So, here are my thoughts on the latest Disney+ addition to the Marvel Universe: Things I Liked Sylvie  - she was the absolute stand-out of the whole show. I had never heard of Sophia Di Martino before, but she absolutely killed it. I love that about the MCU - taking virtual unknowns (like Tom Hiddleston pre- Thor ) and casting them in big roles. The chemistry between Sylvie and Loki was palpable, and I'm not ashamed to say that I totally ship them. I'm eager to see what Sylvie does next, and eager to see Di Martino in more projects!  Mobius - when I first heard about Owen Wilson being cast in a role in the MCU, I was like, Just kidding. But I was curious to see how the actor, a character in and of himself, would work out. He was such a br...