Mind and Body
Years ago when I was pregnant with my first child, I read pregnancy books with dismay. They informed me that I was going to get fat and clumsy and my thinking would go foggy and my emotions would be unstable. I read and wondered “How will I still be me when so much about me changes?” I feared losing my identity, my “self”. Obviously I’m still me, I still have my self, but I have definitely learned that the condition of my body affects what I am capable of accomplishing. I don’t like that. I intensly dislike that pregnancy or illness or chemical imbalance can take away from me things that I value about my self. “Stable”, “Capable”, and “Responsible” are all words that I want to always be able to use when describing myself. There are hosts of other words “creative”, “imaginative”, “energetic” and yet it is entirely possible that some bodily condition could put those things forever out of reach. All it would take is a car crash to land me in a world where my whole existence is narrowly focused around pain management. All it would take is for me to beat the odds on yet another rare or disabling illness. All it would take is for me to not have access to Thyroid medication and my world would dissolve into emotional chaos. I’m pretty sure that a thyroid imbalance is what has set off all this gloom in the first place.
All of this psuedo-philosophical rambling is me trying to hide a childish “It’s not fair!” behind enough words so that no one knows I’ve said it. Life isn’t fair. No one said it was. Life isn’t permanent. No one said it was. Life is a gift. All those capabilities and qualities that I fear losing are gifts. I need to enjoy the gifts while I have them because I’m pretty sure some of them are only on loan. Anyone who has done any aging will tell you so. Most of all I need to be grateful that medical science has made resovling a thyroid imbalance into a simple procedure. I really should not grumble about my soluable medical condition when so many people suffer under conditions which continue to mystify all the experts.
So tomorrow I’ll be trotting myself to the doctor for a blood test. Then I’ll get to re-convince everyone that “High normal” actually means that the dosage of my medicine definitely needs to be raised. I’ve gone through this multiple times before, I just was hoping that my broken gland would stabilize instead of continuing to slowly degrade. I really dislike being dependent on daily dosages of medicine, but I am intensely grateful that medical science has made my continued existence and daily medicine possible. I’ve got to remind myself of that because I’m currently chemically inclined to gloominess.