It's a turn of phrase that's been running through my mind lately. Keel-hauled. Sounds ominous and pirate-y. And it perfectly describes how I've been feeling.
Do you know what keel-hauling involved? You were tied to a rope that looped beneath the ship, thrown overboard, then dragged under the keel from bow to stern. If you were pulled quickly, the barnacles would tear you up, sometimes limb from limb. If they dragged you slowly, you would sink enough to miss the barnacles and instead you drowned.
Back in January I was taken off the thyroid medicine I'd been on for a year. The doctor and I discussed it and because all of my blood tests had been normal and I was still suffering from the same symptoms, we concluded it wasn't working. By the beginning of March I could tell something was definitely not right. Apparently the thyroid medication had been making a difference, small though it was. Enough of a difference that when I didn't have it anymore the fallout was massive. My depression, which is always in a state of flux, took a nose dive. I crashed and burned. It got so bad that at one point I couldn't bring myself to care about what Penny was doing. I'd put on a movie for her and then wait it out until we could both go down for a nap. Sleep had become my escape. The place where I didn't have to think or do or be; I could just be numb.
Fundamentally I knew this wasn't right so I went back to the doctor and had an ultrasound done on my thyroid. Then they scheduled an uptake exam at the hospital which is just a fancy type of CT scan. Then I was scheduled to see a specialist. Turns out my right thyroid is twice the size of my left, which is already larger than it should be. The blood work is still showing no problems at all. The doctors put me back on medication and I have a biopsy scheduled in June.
And yet knowing that something else was wrong didn't fix anything. Do you know what the first major symptom is of hypothyroidism? Depression. And mine was getting significantly worse. Jason took a week off of work and my parents even flew in to help. And it did help. For a time. Then they had to go back home and Jason had to go back to work. We're taking steps to improve this all-consuming depression, looking into therapists and new medications.
And all the while, I'm still here. Either crashing against the keel or drowning.
