Day 15-16

As weird as this is to say, I am am so thankful to have cried in the doctor's office on Tuesday and also for standing my ground afterward. I woke up Tuesday morning feeling the exhaustion that has become part of my daily experience. It has been some time since I have felt like myself, and though many of the recent conscious changes I have made have been positive and necessary, my body has decided to make some other not so necessary and definitely unapproved changes. Basically I have been feeling like an 80 year old dementia patient. So, I called my doctor (something I rarely do) and made an appointment. As I described the symptoms I was having, she added them to the ever growing list. Now I HATE feeling like a hypochondriac, so it took a LONG time for me to go to the doctor for a lot of these issues. Consequently I had a list of issues that would make a hypochondriac look normal to report. Knowing what she was probably thinking, I kind of lost my cool. All the frustration of not functioning properly at home and work because of the barrage of problems I have been experiencing kind of came out all at once. Thankfully she took me very seriously, but naturally her immediate response was that I was depressed and needed an anti-depressant or anti-anxiety medication. Don't get me wrong...I know depression and have lived with it for many years; but I am not depressed. I will be the first to admit it when I am (and will still be stubborn about medication) - but this has been a very different experience and I wanted to know what to do to make it go away, not just keep some of the symptoms at bay.  So after insisting that we keep looking for other possible causes for my symptoms she began doing some typical doctor-y things. She listened to my chest, took my blood pressure and then palpated my throat before doing some blood-work. As she palpated my throat, she lingered and began muttering some "hmms" and "huhs".  She then informed me that my thyroid was enlarged and she felt a goiter. At this point I thought to myself "What the heck is a goiter, and who in their right mind would come up with such a horrible name?" It's very difficult for me to bring myself to say that word out lound, but there it is. A goiter. So, I Googled "goiter" and found out lots of fascinating things about them, ,including the fact that they are often caused by hypothyroidism. As I looked further into the symptoms of hypothyroidism I was relieved to find that other people have had all of these crazy symptoms I have been having and then some. I love it when I am not the only weirdo out there. :) I also wondered if this could be the culprit in my case. I guess I will have to wait for ultrasound results from today and the information she gathered from my blood-work on Tuesday. Not to sound like I am hoping for a problem, but the fact is I'm having many of them and I would LOVE an answer to why I have been feeling this way. If it turns out everything is fine with my thyroid, that's great news! I guess I will start the search over until we either find the problem, or I give in to the anti-depressant/anxiety meds. Either way I hope I can begin to feel like myself again!