Week 1 & 2 - Recovery

I'm going to see the surgeon tomorrow.  I am hoping he will take this bandage off of my neck.  I am getting tired of people staring at it.  I told a lady at the library the other day that it was a tattoo.  She gave me a quick uncomfortable smile and ran away. I told another lady that I was covering up a hole where my cigarette goes in.  She too, scurried away.  I can't keep doing that...especially with my children around.  It is amusing.  My daughter just looks at me with a knowing smirk and I know I'm creating a child with a very dark sense of humor. I simply can't help myself sometimes.

It will be a full 2 weeks since I have had my surgery and I think I have had an epiphany.  I realize, since surgery, that exhaustion does not include the feeling of being weighed down.  I think the feeling of being weighed down is...depression. Along with this new information, I have come to accept that I have more than likely been depressed for a very long time. I come from a long line of women that laugh at the word "depressed".  I am or was one of those type of people.  How on Earth could I be depressed if I laugh, find joy, or even look forward to making other people happy?  I simply don't know the answer to that, but I do know that although I am exhausted most of the time now, I don't feel weighed down anymore.  I want to run again and go places and dance in the kitchen with my kids.  I don't think I was an Eeyore before surgery, probably more like Pooh Bear, but now I want to be Tigger.  If only I had a thyroid to help out with energy part and of course better hips to aid me with dancing and running, life would be perfect.

Along with the grey clouds being lifted, I have been given back my memory.  I don't remember much and that is something that I have been dealing with for years.  I have important memories that I hold dear, but the majority of my childhood is essentially gone. I am starting to remember things that have seemed fuzzy for years and most of those memories are not good.  It has unnerved me and I have begun to think that maybe on some crazy level my thyroid was protecting me or  it could be that stressed out little girls grow up to have stressed adrenals and everything else begins to breakdown.  I'm only speaking for myself, but I remember seeing a psychologist about 3 years ago.  I was feeling tired.  I was unable to get any restful sleep or any sleep at all.  I felt like I was at the beginning of a breakdown.  My regular doctor wanted to give me an antidepressant and because "I don't get depressed", I refused. He suggested I see a psychologist. I believed I was stressed not depressed for obvious reasons.  My husband had been deployed 3 months after we had our daughter and was basically missing the first year of her life.  We moved from our home in Texas to a much smaller one in NC.  I was in a new place with no friends or family.  It was stressful not depressing, or so I thought.

The psychologist was weird, but now that I think back on her, I should have listened.  After we spoke at length, she told me that she didn't believe that I was stressed because of any of the issues I told her about (I spoke about Iraq and my husband's deployment), she thought I had depleted the cortisol in my body because of the constant stress in my life as a whole.  She believed that I had PTSD, but didn't think it had anything to do with Iraq.  She, from one question, in which I was blindly honest, figured that I had PTSD from my childhood and my cortisol levels had been slowly depleting since a very early age.  I thought the lady was full of crap, but now that I have educated myself, I realize what she was describing was Adrenal Fatigue.  If only she would have said the name! I never went back to her after that first meeting and now (since surgery) I think of her often.  She read me correctly and that scared me.  I have always been able to hide the pain of my childhood quite well, but she saw it and I felt like I couldn't breathe after leaving her.  I had been found out. She could see that I was damaged and I didn't like that.  The question that gave me away was: What do you want in your life? My answer: A home without chaos.

So...here I am with a bandage around my neck thinking, and thinking.  The fog in my brain has lifted and because of that...I think way too much.  2 weeks after surgery and I have no new "thyroid" stuff going on.  My journey is taking me back to reflect on fixing the inner me.  I will say that even though I think or self reflect more often, there is no emotion attached, which is weird to me.  There is a dullness and I can't put my finger on what that is.

Oh wait, I'm lying...I did get blood work back and the Endo doesn't want to do anything to my medication just yet.  Speaking with some people on the Hashimoto's support page on FB, I have been reminded that I need to take it slow in regards to getting the optimal level of medication.  Here are my labs: TSH 0.762 (0.450-4.500), T4 1.68 (0.82-1.77), T3 2.6 (2.0-4.4), TPO 507 (0-34).  Let me know what you think.