My brain has been a bit mushy for about a week now. Things are OK, but I haven't been motivated to write anything of any decent substance. I'm having another minor medication problem.
I recently started taking Levothyroxine, a drug for hypothyroidism. I love this drug. I want to marry this drug and have little Levothyroxine babies. It has changed a lot of things. For example: Last spring, I was bound and determined to lose the 40 or so pounds of extra weight I have been carrying around far too long. I followed Weight Watchers religiously for a month. I also exercised five days a week. On MWF, I either swam for 30-40 minutes or did weights and 45 minutes of cardio. And I had to walk the 20 minute walk to the gym and back. For WW purposes, I was earning about 7 activity points a day. Then on most Tues. and Thurs. I did a half hour cardio video from WW that was worth 2 points. This was in addition to carrying two non-walking toddlers everywhere and up and down stairs etc. And walking quite a few places as well. The second month, I added pre-packaged food from the Zone Gourmet. I ate nothing except this frozen diet food for two months. It was really monotonous. After all this work, I lost a total of..........
0 pounds. Nothing. Nada. Zilch. Sure, the scale would fluctuate a pound or two week after week. But in total? Nothing. It was so depressing, I just gave up. I could eat a lot of crap and not really gain much, but nothing I did as far as dieting helped with weight loss.
So, then this December I got on Levo. And after some tinkering with the dosage, I started back on WW. And I will say that I follow it pretty closely, but not perfectly. And I don't let any of those flex points get by without me using them up each week. I still work out at the gym 2-3 days a week. I dropped weights and upped my cardio, but also have not gotten back to doing my Tues./Thurs. videos, either. In January, I lost a total of.........
9 pounds!!! All from a reasonable but not crazy strict effort and that drug. The only bad thing about that drug was that it was making my sleep patterns crazy. I would fall asleep and then wake up every half hour. But I didn't care because I had SO MUCH ENERGY. And even that had settled a bit. I was getting to where I could at least sleep for 5-6 hour stretches.
Until.
Last weekend, I started to itch. And itch and itch and itch. All over my body. Mostly my hands, but in my hair, my legs, my places you don't want to know about. Crazy, insanity causing itchiness. After several days of ruling out different causes, I decided to stop taking the drug. Within 48 hours of my last dose, the itching completely stopped. Aaahh it was so wonderful.
And then the sleep came. Oh, glorious sleep, how I've missed ye. I drop dead at 11:30 and sleep straight through the night until sometimes 9 or 10 the next day. And I have even been taking an afternoon nap. It's been all about sleep for about 4 days now. Lovely lovely sleep.
But, I don't want to sleep forever and I don't want to be fat forever. So, I am kind of between a rock and a hard place now. In January, I switched prescription drug coverage and they required that I get the generic brand of Levo. I had been using the name brand. My doctor thinks it is possible I may be allergic to a filler in the generic that may not be in the brand, and also there is a chance that I could get through the itching side effect and it would eventually subside. So, I'm taking a few more days off until I start with the brand Levo again to see what happens. My marriage with it may not be over yet. Or there are maybe a few other different drugs I could try that also treat hypothyroidism.
So, all this is to say that I haven't been writing because I've either been itching or sleeping. Aside from that, things are fine. D is fine. Kids are good. Life is going as well as can be expected. I have blog entries on the brain but when I compose them in my head, the sentences trail off into strange and weird dreams about my internal love affair with Jim Halpert from The Office. (I don't really think I'm crushing on him during my waking hours, really, he's just been showing up in my dreams lately.)
I'm trying to read some stuff by Alfie Kohn as well, that I want to write about. I'm reading him so that I can knock some of my strict behaviorist training out of my head. So that has been interesting, yet even that has trailed of into sleep. So, sorry for the long delay...and more to come soon. Hope you are doing well out there, all you nice people who live in my computer.
ETA: Help a space case out here: I just found out 5 seconds ago that I have to bring a main dish to a potluck with a "mexican/latin" theme in a few days. (I hate mandated theme-y crap, but whatever.) Got ideas/recipes? Something easy to make, carry and serve to about ten people and a handful of small children?