I'm still alive

Last night was rough. I go through periods of feeling pretty great followed by some rough patches and I find that usually when I stop taking my thyroid medicine for a few days I start to feel better. It's my body telling me that I've got too much Synthroid in my system and it's a huge balancing act of trying to blindly regulate my levels.

I've been having pretty extreme leg pain this week and last night it escalated beyond my exhausting leg pain and materialized into whole-body numbness. It's hard to explain. My face, arms, legs, and down one side of my back felt as if they were coated in Icy Hot or Ben Gay, this unexplainable numbing burning sensation. I tossed around under the covers thinking that maybe I was lying on a nerve and it was causing those symptoms. I thought maybe I was dehydrated or low on calcium. After two hours of being awake and petrified that I couldn't feel my body, or rather I could feel it but it was burning and sore, I crawled downstairs and wrote about how I was feeling on Facebook. I was terrified. And a part of me wanted to write it down on Facebook so that if I had died during the night people would know why. That sounds extremely dramatic but it was such a scary pain that I envisioned that maybe I had a blood clot in my legs or I was going into hypocalcemic shock and my heart would give out and I would pass in my sleep. I remember looking at a picture of Kate as I fell in and out of consciousness and wondering if she would remember me if I didn't make it through the night. I was ready to wake Sean up to take me to the hospital. But then I thought, none of my endocrinologists can help me without changing my Synthroid dose and telling me to wait a few weeks to see if I feel better so how would a hospital be able to fix me? So I drank some water in case I was simply dehydrated and fell back to sleep around 3AM.

I woke this morning feeling numb in my arms and legs but no longer in my back and face. An improvement. When I heard Kate giggling in her crib I opted to call for Sean to carry her downstairs because I didn't trust myself to bring her myself. Sean came up to check on me a few minutes later and my feet and hands were extremely clammy and I looked gray in the face. I'm not sick, this is all normal thyroid cancer stuff, but basically--as Cancer.org so nicely explains, "Extreme tiredness, called fatigue, is very common in people treated for cancer. This is not a normal tiredness, but a bone-weary exhaustion that doesn't get better with rest."--it feels like all of my bones are bending backwards. It feels like I'm recovering from running a marathon and I can never fully recoup.