I took a two-week medical leave from work to go spend time with family while I starting a seizure medication called Keppra. It makes me feel tired and dizzy, in a cool spaced-out feeling sort of way.
I'm also having thyroid problems again. My thyroid levels were way off when I did my quarterly blood-work last month. I've taken natural desiccated thyroid hormones preserved from the thyroid glands of pigs for the
past two years and was doing just fine up until now. I think the seizure and/or seizure meds have interacted with my thyroid function.
I'm having restless nights of sleep, extreme fatigue, and hair loss (though not as much as when I was anemic a couple summers
ago after giving up beef).
My doctor was concerned about my lab results and felt around for a lump on my thyroid, didn't say anything, and ordered a thyroid
ultrasound, which I'm having done next week. I'm guessing I might have a small goiter, since thyroid
goiters run in my family, on my mother's side. It would be a harmless
procedure to have it removed. I've been feeling my neck a lot lately, but it's so bumpy in general I can't tell what to feel for. But that was the least of my worries.
Right after my seizure happened in September, a coworker told me that medical leave would be covered by my employer. Long story short, I was misinformed. Last Friday morning I screamed like
Homer Simpson when I checked my online bank account and saw that my directly
deposited paycheck was missing a digit. And my next paycheck will be missing a digit as well.
And the kicker. I have to take Keppra - this synthetic mind-altering prescription drug that micromanages the electricity in my brain.
Why did things have to start going wrong? I was feeling so good and rejuvenated by the end of summer. I quit drinking in September. I got back into yoga in October. I was taking walks and jogs, getting along with my students, reconnecting with old friends. But I couldn't keep the ball rolling.
I dropped out of the college program I needed to keep one of my two teaching certifications active. My second teacher certification will expire in August. I'm 34 and have no idea what I'm going to do after this year. I could renew my second teacher certification and keep looking for an English teaching job, though there are more TESL (Teaching English as a Second Language) jobs than plain old English teaching jobs these days.
I've thought of relocating back to Manhattan and working in a publishing house, or becoming a yoga-certified instructor, since I have the nearly 200 hours of documented practice required. Maybe I'll meet a rich man who chooses me over the supermodels and wealthy business women he could otherwise be dating. Maybe I'll release my music album and the video that was made to Farmer John and people will like it.
I don't like this new medication Keppra. It's a huge horse-pill for one. I had to have a long hard talk with myself about taking it. One of the side effects is weight gain. Another is fatigue. And the list goes on. It's expensive, too. And my insurance doesn't cover prescriptions. I reflected on the Erin who once believed there was a natural cure for everything.
I even tracked down
a holistic doctor who practices German New Medicine and believes that
early childhood psychological conflicts trigger seizure disorders
(amongst some other diseases). She told me a seizure disorder is
triggered by seeing a lost limb. Incidentally, my dad had
his first seizure the day after witnessing his brother lose a finger
to a chainsaw.
But at the end of this talk with myself, I
concluded that I needed to take whatever means necessary to eliminate
the chance of ever having another gran mal seizure at work, where I
could possibly soil my pants while convulsing and foaming at the
mouth in front of coworkers.
I don't recall ever
seeing someone lose a limb, but maybe after my dad suffered that psychological trauma, it left a marker in his DNA, and
was passed onto me. I'm just guessing though. I don't know really why
this is happening to my body.
I don't mind having
thyroid problems. I've come to terms, throughout my own research on my health, that my thyroid may need to be removed one of these days.
It's completely inactive in my body. I tried going off thyroid medication
2 years ago and within 6 weeks nearly lost the ability to speak.
In the olden
days, when people's thyroids didn't work, it was called Myxedema,
and it was characterized by the inability to pronounce words, along with fatigue and hair loss and feeling cold all the time and mental fogginess. In those days, my disorder would have gone untreated and I would have been labeled "dumb".
But thyroid
medication takes care of that for people these days. I've come to appreciate my WP Thyroid, which is more natural than the synthetic thyroid hormones I took in my late 20's, which were horrible. I was tired all the time and cold and confused. The WP Thyroid, though also a prescription drug, is actually the natural preserves of pig thyroid hormones. Pig thyroid hormones are nearly identical to human thyroid hormones.
Thyroid problems I can handle. I'm sure I'll sort out this little bump in the "throad" soon.
Brain problems are scarier though. My memory is a mess. It's become embarrassing. I tell
people I'm bad with names, and I lie about remembering things I
should remember, but don't.The other day I couldn't remember the word "idiom," even though I taught a short unit on idioms to my period 5 class last month.
I had a few fainting spells in my teen years but nothing of concern to my parents or I. Nothing I even visited a doctor or hospital for growing up. My first fainting spell happened in church while singing a song in front of the congregation. Kind of like when you go to a recital, and you see a couple kids drop like flies. Maybe from too much oxygen or something. This was what happened to me I think.
It didn't scare me back then. I kind of liked fainting. A total mental trip would occur in the seconds leading up to
my collapse, and when I'd awoken from what felt like an eternity-long
slumber, I was briefly born again into a world where, for a few seconds, I didn't know my name or whereabouts. Who are these people
around me? Am I naked?
And one time I was,
because I fainted in the shower, and my parents busted into the
bathroom, my 16-year-old self never quite felt the same way
around them after that day. But my mother kindly lies and says they
didn't look behind the curtain.
Another backup plan I read about was a special high fat, low-carb diet that seems to cure seizure disorders for some people. But I'd have to be on the diet forever. Eliminating carbs would be difficult for me, especially now that
I've given up on caring about what I look like naked. I'd rather undergo some hypnotherapy with the
holistic doctor to revisit traumatic childhood memories I've possibly suppressed, of arms and legs
falling off people.
My two-week medical
leave was well spent though. I split my time equally between my sister and parents' houses. I
rested and watched How I Met Your Mother on Netflix at my sister's
house for the first week, and played with my parents' two new puppies at
their home for the second week. I watched TV with my 95 year old grandmother, too, since she fell and hurt her hip, and has since moved in with my parents.
"We're all falling apart. You know everyone has to die someday."
These were her words of encouragement to me.
The week spent with my sister was great. She lives out
in the woods in the middle of nowhere, atop a hill that overlooks
waterfalls. White bunnies live across the street in a wild patch
of land. She throws carrots into that overgrown field sometimes, feeling responsible for their lives in some small way. She owns a pit-bull mix of some
sort, who is friends with the bunnies. They even sometimes play together.
Her dog's name is Zoey and Zoey doesn't seem to understand that she's supposed to be a protective watch dog for Bethany. She should be baring her teeth, letting saliva gather grossly around her jowls, and growling at creepy bearded mountain men who pass by.
Zoey is too kind. She might not even realize she is a dog. She was left alone tied up in the woods somewhere for a lengthy period of her puppy-hood before a stranger found her and brought her into a
shelter. Bethany assumed a pit bull would be as effective as a home security system, and cheaper to boot, so she adopted her.
Bethany has a theory that Zoey was exposed to, and possibly raised by, deer and squirrels during her abandonment in the woods as a puppy. She pointed out how Zoey walks high on her
toes as if they were hooves. When she prances about the hardwood floors she sounds like a woman in high heels scrambling around before work. The click-clacks resonate throughout the house.
“Either go lay
down or go bark at somebody! Be a dog! Stop walking around! What are
you doing with your life!?” Bethany yells.
When Zoey sleeps,
she stretches out her limbs and crosses each set of ankles, looking very graceful, like a deer.
While on her runner, Zoey frolics and leaps over imaginary obstacles. She's kind to the
wildlife. Squirrels eat their nuts beside her. Birds peruse the backyard foliage right alongside Zoey. And the bunnies hop on over sometimes to poop in Bethany's yard. Zoey eats up the poop pellets.
"Stop eating shit you little bitch!"
She takes out her aggression safely. My sister that is. Zoey has no aggression.
Bethany lets me
indulge in the solitude of her home while I'm her couch-ridden guest.
I feel like I'm in a late 19th century cure cottage. Bethany's town population is mostly made up of summer residents who own camps and trailers. The only sounds I hear are the low moans of the winter wind outside, and the
wood-stove crackling, and Zoey's click clacks, and occasionally Bethany
yelling at the dog or at some inanimate object in the house that isn't doing what it's supposed to.
While I'm her guest, she keeps the
wood-stove burning, and sometimes I get so warm I
sweat profusely. I tell myself it's good to sweat out
toxins, since I can't exercise.
Bethany dims the
lights each evening, and plays the bongos, sometimes chanting a
conglomeration of intonations laced with unpredictably placed syllabic accents. It sounds soothing, and mysterious, like a Native American prayer.
A speaking in tongues. A song with no words, and yet with so many.
She cooks me eggs and toast each morning, and pleads with me to take a walk with her each day. On the 3rd
and final day of my lodging, she encourages me to join her on a jog.
I try, but the muscles around my joints are too weak, and my knees
feel stiff. I stop after about a half mile, pain shooting up my right
knee. She finishes her spirited run and meets me on the way back. We
walk up the huge hill to her house together and say good-bye to
one another.
She won't hug me
because she says it seems weird to hug. I say fine, see you in a
couple weeks, and I leave.
“Text me when you
get back home! Drive safe! I love you! You're the best sister anyone
could have!!”
Something like that,
and we have a bittersweet parting that only sisters growing old
together can understand.
I'll see her again
at Christmas, I remind myself. It's sad to leave. I remember when we
watched season 4, episode 6 of How I Met Your Mother just a few days earlier, and how we gave each
other a knowing look when in the final moments of the show, Ted Mosby tells
his children, "Kids you may think your only choices are to
swallow your anger or throw it in someone's face, but there's a third
option. You can just let it go, and only when you do that is it
really gone, and you can move forward."
My sister and I are
moving forward. She's caring for me, taking me under her wing like a mother hen. Our past
fights, despite being very brutal, are farts in the wind.
Being home with family made me want to write. Maybe it was the boredom too. I can't really say exactly how. Inspiration doesn't always come when you call.
Letting go of anger. I don't really get angry. Though I pretend to be angry daily as a teacher. It's also therapeutic to yell sometimes. I've had more than a few screaming matches with unruly students and it's helped strengthen my diaphragm so I sing better. See God uses even my anger to improve my gift.
More often than feeling angry I just feel sad. I hold onto sadness I suppose because it's the only thing I can feel sometimes.
I talked to one of
my Indian guy friends who I dated for a couple months last year. (I refer to him as Bandi in a past blog). He was the only one of a dozen Indians I met that I still talk to. Bandi and I are strictly platonic. He calls a few times a week, just
to talk, and I like that, and tonight on the phone he tells me his ex
wants to get back together with him.
"What did you tell her?!" I nervously ask.
He told her he didn't know. He doesn't know if he even wants to stay in Boston much longer. He's not happy. He doesn't know what he wants. He starts to pour his heart out to me.
"I can't imagine things ever going back to the way they were. I feel like something was
broken inside me," he says.
I tell him I know that feeling.
I recite to him a
quote about love I heard before:
“There's lots of
love in this life, but never the same love twice.”
(Maybe he'll finally take the
hint and fall in love with me.)
No he won't. We don't have much in common
to start. But we found each other 8 months ago on a dating website when we each really needed a friend more than anything else. I visit him in Boston once or twice a month, just to chat and go to the grocery store and run errands together. Sometimes we eat out, other times he cooks for me. When I sleep over on a weekend, I make quiche in the morning. We have a nice little routine, and a friendship with boundaries. We sleep together in his bed, and just hold hands. Nothing more, nothing
less. Like an old married couple. At least I like to pretend that's
what it's like. It's also like having a gay friend. Except he's not gay. He's just not that into me. But I might love him. So I let our friendship be. Just the way it is.
Now I sit here, finishing up my blog, and I've had two
full weeks to contemplate the meaninglessness of my life. I've sat
around and thought of the husband I'd never find and the kids I'd
never have and the songs I'd never write and the retirement I'd never
save.
Yet I'm not angry.
After binging on fast food and How I Met Your Mother for two weeks, I realize I'll probably never find love as long as I'm looking for it. May as well give up now. Throw in the workout towel and call it a day. Love will have to find me and accept me just the way I am. Even if I get fat. I'll have to believe there's some higher order working this all out. Some undiscovered law of the universe perhaps. A fine line between hopelessness and surrender that I haven't learned to walk.
