REJOICE!!!!!

I went to my doctor this week for my 6 month check up.  The past two weeks I have been miserable.  I have hurt more than I have ever hurt, I have been so tired that I have been drinking coffee every day (I never drink coffee) and I have been crying almost every night.  The long and the short of it:  Hubby's idiopathic allergy took a dangerous turn and became an anaphylactic allergy and he now has an epi-pen.  E has been suffering from headaches and things at the theater have become extremely tenuous as one of the partners is dangerously close to being fired.  Living so far from town is taking its toll on us financially and emotionally and I have struggled to hold everything together which is why I haven't blogged.  Everything was just TOO much.

To add insult to injury, I went to bed one night weighing one thing and woke up the next day weighing 6 pounds more.  REALLY!!! One day.  Nothing about my eating habits changed, I am still working out 5 days a week, but that is how fast it happened.  No one gains 6 pounds in 24 hours but me.  I felt like just giving up and staying in bed all day long.  True depression, right?

But yesterday at my doctor's appointment, she was talking to me about my blood test results.  She started off by telling me how much muscle tone she could see on me, she said she was so impressed.  Then she went through my cholesterol numbers.  They were better than they have ever been and she couldn't believe just how much I must have changed my habits to bring them down without any medicine.  My "fatty" liver which I had started to develop has completely disappeared and my sugar levels were great.  She said she wished all her overweight patients were as healthy as me.  But then she said, "However..."  She had written down  my concerns the last time we met about the possibility that my cortisol levels were out of whack and causing me to gain weight.   Being as there is a link between cortisol and thyroid she issued a different thyroid test on me, the one that measures the smaller increments rather than the .5-5. increments.  Lo and Behold, my thyroid levels are off.

My thyroid levels are off!  I almost cried tears of joy.  I have been saying for years I thought there was something wrong with my thyroid and my symptoms have been worsening in the past few months.  Even my memory was giving me problems.  I was really scared I was having early onset dementia.  My levels are just off a bit (they are 4.00 but should be 2.5-3.00 by the test I took), but she said that they are discovering that there is a wide range of how thyroid affects people.  She said I didn't have enough of a level discrepancy to mandate that I take medicine, but with the problems I have been having recently, she thought I should try a low dose of medicine to see if it helps.

She warned me that the weight would still be hard to take off, but at least my energy levels should come back and that would help with the exercising.  Heck, she didn't have to convince me, she had me at "however".  Bring on the pills.  So I took my first one today.  I know realistically it takes more than one day for these pills to work, but you know what?  I didn't drink any coffee today.  And I haven't cried a single tear.  And maybe, just maybe, this will be my turning point.  Maybe I can actually hope that the weight will come off, no matter how slowly.

Today really feels like the first day of the rest of my life.