desirable levels

photo: anna aden

I want to lay naked at nighttime but the chills erupt. My thyroid is low. Too low. Finally, a recommendation to an endocrinologist, which I requested from Kaiser at the beginning of the pregnancy: denied. Now at 13 weeks my thyroid result came back .25. Normal being .40 - 4.00 and desirable for pregnancy is to be on the high level of normal, to prevent the developmental delays that can come for a baby in a low thyroid mother. I added another pill four days ago, when I got the online results and did not need a doctor to tell me it was best for baby to add more thyroid. I am angry at my doctor you couldn't possibly be having symptoms already, we just changed the dose... it's not necessary to test you yet... and angry at myself for not being more aggressive. It's my fucking baby.

I am slack jawed and fuzzy eyed, achy limbed and exhausted, throwing up a few times a day again and spending the time in between sick and tired. The workweek is exhausting. I come home from work and collapse on the couch while Mr. Curry makes dinner and wake to eat, homework, tidy, shower, and collapse again.

This week is the hardest. It is when I miscarried. That baby died at 10 or 11 weeks so I am past that danger point, but somehow it is still this week, when the baby slid violently out of me, that is the hardest to get through. I am down to half the Zoloft I was taking before I became pregnant; the weight of this physical unhappiness and engulfment is becoming harder to handle gracefully. I find myself complaining more to Mr. Curry at home and fighting the urge to sulk. It is amazing how the physical suffering of the body can force out the personality with the ease and strength of a wave pushing the swimmer underwater. All the rest of the world's people and their chatter and cares and conversation murmur around me like traffic outside the window- real enough, but inconsequential. A smiling face, interested eyes, appropriate responses- all these at work are actual work for me right now, with my body constantly calling out, squeezing, aching, vomiting,shuddering. I find people who demand bright chatter extremely annoying.

I am desperate to prove myself as a novelist. I must finish my book. It is good, very good, but I don't know if it's great- but it's very good and I have absolute faith it will get an agent and publisher but I must finish those final pages!!! Please send me strength of spirit and mind to type those words, those sentences, and finish my novel. I am meant to do this, I know it, and it gnaws at me every night as I sleep that I am leaving my passion to the wind. The unhappy physical state of the last few months have made writing so much more difficult. I remind myself nothing will get easier when Biggie Pea is born. I must finish before November, when baby is due.