Creative Melancholy

I have been dreaming about writing this blog all day.

I don’t know what it is, but depressing weather always makes me more creative. I’m more of a homebody when it rains, and I want to write or color or bake or… whatever.

There have been warnings about the upcoming weather for days. The hurricane that’s hitting Mexico is manifesting as a very wet weekend in Central Texas. They predicted fatal floods and 100-year events.

All last night I was imagining the rain to come. The fat drops that fall from the sky with such velocity that they bounce off the ground whole before shattering into solid fractions, as opposed to splashing on the ground in fluid orbs. Sheets of water rushing through the streets and the gutters in the courtyard running over capacity and flooding the gravel swale in front of our patio until I worry that it’s going to creep into our living room before the flood drains can catch up to speed and suck it all into the storm system and dump it into Shoal Creek.

Alas, that is not the case. It was rainy overnight. Rainy enough that we woke to headlines of a car being washed away in west Austin, and enough that the umbrella on our patio knocked into the window a few times. And enough that when I let the dogs out this morning I was frustrated to see that the shoji screen separating their “comfort boxes” from the rest of the patio had blown over in the night, which meant that I actually had to put on PANTS and go out and set it upright, instead of just letting them out and then crawling back into bed.

But it has been solid rain all day. The kind of rain that’s strong enough that it makes you think twice about going out and makes you trot from the car to the door, but not the kind that makes you wary of your own safety. Not a repeat of the May/June deluge.

The water still thunders down the gutters in the courtyard, the sheet metal tubes amplifying the sound and making the generous rain sound like a flooding sheet instead. Sirens wail in the distance, but this is a city and there are always sirens. It probably has nothing to do with the rain. Soccer fields are flooded out and I’m sure the creeks are high and people living or working on the banks are crossing their fingers. So far, though, the rain is providing us merely a welcome respite from the heat and a touch of creative melancholy.

Right now, right this minute, I’m in a pleasantly inebriated state. I’m a couple of stages before drunk, in the kind of buzzed haze that a couple of glasses of wine will give you. Happy enough to let your guard down a little, but still in control and nowhere near drunk. It’s a difficult balancing act. I enjoy the buzz but I don’t enjoy the drunk, so I’m nursing a glass of wine next to me to keep it going but not put me over the edge.

It’s been a long week for us. Sean’s work is sucking him dry. He slept 9 hours last night, which is probably more than he slept for the whole rest of the week combined. That might be a little bit of hyperbole, but he didn’t come to bed before 2 AM Monday through Thursday, and he was up until after 4 AM Friday. Grad school and a sucky job are taking their toll. Watching him be so stressed and knowing that there’s nothing I can do for it almost causes me physical pain. I would do anything for him, but there’s nothing I CAN do.

I was also diagnosed with Hashimoto’s Thyroiditis last week. It’s an auto-immune thyroid disease that causes a host of issues, not least among them the propensity to gain weight and the inability to lose it. So that explains a lot. It also is causing me anger and anxiety and excitement. Anger, because I’ve asked three doctors in the last five years if I might have a thyroid disorder, and they all looked at one marker on my blood panel (ONE!) and said no. Anxiety because I have a lot of life changes ahead of me (food sensitivities, anyone?). Excitement because I have a clear path forward, and instead of feeling like the failure who can’t lose weight and is somehow doing everything wrong even though I’m doing everything I’m told, I feel like the victor who’s lost 43 pounds in spite of the fact that I shouldn’t be able to have much success.

I also feel vindicated because Hashimoto’s is autoimmune. It’s not something that I can develop because of lifestyle… it’s not a symptom of lifestyle (being fat), but rather is the cause of it. There’s nothing I could have done to prevent it. Likewise, there’s nothing I can do to cure it.

I’m on hormones and a lot of supplements now, in addition to staying away from foods to which I am sensitive and cause abnormal inflammation. They don’t cause the Hashimoto’s, but they do exacerbate it. So I spend my days avoiding all dairy, egg whites, wheat, yeast, and almonds (goodbye, everything that make life worth living), and I spend my nights filling my designer pillbox (thank you, Amazon!) with the 20 or so pills a day that I have to take, in addition to my regular multivitamins, probiotic powder, and vitamin D drops.

I’m frustrated with myself, too, because though I asked doctors if I had a thyroid problem, I always assumed that they were right and things were just difficult because I was lazy or that was “the way things were.” I never took it upon myself to research things and figure out that hey, I have 10 of the 12 symptoms of Hashimoto’s! I didn’t know enough to be my own advocate and press for the blood tests that would have diagnosed me years ago.

But I know now, and I have the benefit of being in the best physical shape of my life, even if I’m still fat. I’m a freaking bad ass coated in cuddly layers of cushion. Hopefully now that I know what’s going on I can address it and start melting that cushion away.

It is unusual for me to be so open in a blog that I know many read, but I do so with purpose. Hashimoto’s and similar disorders go undiagnosed in a huge population of people because many doctors won’t test for it, or don’t take the time to diagnose it. This isn’t necessarily their fault, because these problems can be very sneaky. The symptoms are wide and varied, and your “root” hormone levels and other numbers can appear absolutely normal…until you test for antibodies and other markers that make you realize that oops… there’s a huge issue here. In my case, one of my antibodies measured 22 times normal. TWENTY TWO TIMES NORMAL. The other was merely 8 times the normal range. I wouldn’t have even bothered trying to track this down again except for my sister, who was sick of listening to me bitch about how much work I was putting into losing weight versus the actual return on effort. “You need to go see a functional medicine doctor,” she chided me. “Promise me you will.”

I found a good one in Austin that had amazing reviews but a huge wait list. I made an appointment for three months out, and nearly canceled it. I am so glad that I didn’t. She gave me the power to be my own advocate and is helping me move forward.

In the meantime, life goes on for us. We’re moving in just under a month, so I need to get my rear-end in gear and get things prepped before the movers come. In under a week we’re headed to NYC, where Sean will run the marathon for the second time, and we’ll celebrate his birthday (and my cousin’s, who lives there and is also running the marathon). It should be a fun time. This is the umpteenth time that we’ve visited the city, but I love it and am excited to go. Sean loves it even more than me, and I can only imagine that he’s excited to get away and into the high-energy city situation that he thrives on.

For now, however, I’ll keep nursing my glass of wine, post this blog without proof-reading, and listen to the rain coursing through our gutters… and enjoy the creative melancholy coming my way this weekend.