Echoes in a Hollow Space

Deficiency. So I learned my lesson about calling in for lab results after spending most of a year with hypothyroidism. Most doctors would call the patient if they found a deficiency, but this is UCLA—they don't call anyone. Good care, mind you, but you definitely have to take responsibility for your own damned self. I saw my doc in January and told him that I'd gradually started to feel better since getting the boost in thyroid hormone in early August. Mostly, I didn't know how bad I'd been feeling until I started to feel better. "That's always the way it is with thyroid," he said. A slow, subtle diminishment until you don't remember what it feels like to feel good.

Anyway, like a good little patient, I called the following week for my lab results. "Your thyroid level is good," he said, "but you've got a severe vitamin D deficiency." He put me on megadoses of vitamins to help correct this. Important vitamin, is D. I must give up my vampire habits and get more sunshine. In fact, I heard an expert talking on NPR not so long ago saying that we've done such a good job of emphasizing sunscreen to people that vitamin D deficiencies are on the rise.

I don't know if it's the vitamins, the placebo effect, or whatevs, but after three weeks on the D, I feel much better.

Dental. As of Tuesday, I will have dropped nearly $1300 on dentistry since mid-December. I needed a crown on one tooth (I'd been dragging my feet on that one, which is a disgusting thing to do in one's mouth), but when I broke a tooth in December I had to face the Musak and go to the dentist. Fortunately, both crowns were on the same side, to localize the pain, and Tuesday will be the end of the process. It would have been last Tuesday only the receptionists forgot to call me and let me know the dentist had called in sick that day. I showed up with my loins all girded only to be told I'd have to gird them again some other time. I was not well pleased.

Dead. And here comes the really whiny part, the part having to do with writing and rewriting my novel. I hit chapter 12 yesterday, and worked on 13 today. I've been okay with most of the writing to this point, but in these last two chapters it's like my voice has died. I know it's there in the opening and again at the end, but here in the oppressive middle it seems strained and stiff. One of my betas even said that I wasn't writing like my normal self, and I've sensed that's true with each draft, but I don't seem to be able to fix it. I don't know how long this dead voice thing will go on before I snap out of it—I have to read further to see—but at least the voice picked up again halfway through chapter 13. After I've finished the whole book I may go back and try to "voicen" up these chapters, but my sense is that I've done about all I can do at this point in time. I may not be able to fix them, or I may have to put a lot of time and space between me and this novel before I can. And I'd really rather start marketing it and concentrate on something else.

So that's what I think I'll do.

Today was the first time I've been out of the house since Friday, January 18.

I came home that Friday and began cleaning house because I was to have company on Saturday evening. Saturday was spent cleaning and cooking, and we had a fine evening—hopefully I didn't give everyone a terrible cold. Sunday I felt totally exhausted, as if I'd gone on a forced march up a mountain. I thought myself pathetic if a good session of house cleaning would lay me low like that.

Monday, of course, I woke up with the Cold That Would Not Die. It totally flattened me. I haven't been knocked out by a cold like that in years—and I've used up half my sick leave the first month of the year. Makes me so not happy. But what are you going to do? I couldn't go to work like that. I didn't really start to feel like a human being until yesterday.

I thought I'd better get out some today because tomorrow I go for my semi-annual thyroid check up at UCLA. UCLA is always an ordeal, even when I'm perfectly well. I tested my strength out with errands today and my strength was not found wanting.

Yay, me. Yay, life.

At the market—Ralph's in Marina del Rey—I ran into a man with a parrot on his shoulder, smelling of brine, who invited me aboard his sloop, the John B. I was forced to decline his offer, being newly reacquainted with life, and he mentioned something about keel hauling. I hit him with my steel-tipped umbrella and put the fear of God in him. He tipped his tricorn hat at me, saying, "Beg pardon, madame" and hobbled off on his peg leg, natty dreads flying in the wind, and pursued by a giant white rabbit wearing a vest and obsessively checking his pocket watch.

Just another day in L.A.

http://crisper.livejournal.com/26562.html

You know, thyroid disease is a serious problem. Because the symptoms are easily misdiagnosed as other things, it's often ignored, which sometimes leads to tragic consequences. The thyroid effects almost every function of the body, including emotional stability, so having a gland that's off kilter and pumping bad hormones into your system is not a good thing. As someone who has had thyroid disease most of my adult life, I take this seriously and urge everyone to get regular thyroid blood tests.

However, the near oh-goody-she's-sick glee just below the surface of this article is symptomatic of a disturbing trend I've noticed in "Disease Clubs": the celebrity spokesperson. "If only someone really famous would get sick with our disease, then we'd really get publicity and funding!" And, boy howdy, Oprah trumps just about everybody.

Am I the only one who finds this weird?

I was very sad to hear of the death of Spalding Gray. Two months ago I heard that he'd disappeared and it didn't look good, but it was sad to hear yesterday that they'd fished his body out of the East River. Maybe it's some kind of relief for his family to finally know the worst so they can start to deal with it, but that seems kind of like something outsiders think while watching a family in crisis. I keep thinking of his three little kids and how devastating it's going to be for them to grow up without a father.

I loved his work. My friends and I would go see him whenever we got the chance. My favorite venue was an intimate theater at UCLA where actor and audience are real close, maybe ten or fifteen feet away from each other. That close to Spalding Gray, it was like sitting around after dinner listening to a remarkable and gifted friend tell you about the extraordinary thing that happened to him just the other day. He could entrance you with the fluidity of his thought and expression, his weird and wonderfully skewed humor, his odd and touching perceptions. Those intimate talks of his gave me a real sense of bonding.

Of course, I know that what I saw was persona, that I don't really know Spalding Gray or his family, but there was something so personal and magic about his monologues that gave me this wonderful sense of a shared journey. My friends and I took to calling him Spuddy because in one of his monologues (Gray's Anatomy?) he mentioned that his mother used to call him that, and because we felt enormous affection for him.

And I can't help thinking about the razor's edge many artists walk. There's a fine line sometimes between creativity and the darker aspects of the mind. A number of artists, like Spuddy, have bipolar disease; others (in my experience) seem to live closer to the edge of depression then the rest of the population. I've spent my times on the dark side, but fortunately my meds have been regulated for the past several years and I'm pretty well balanced.

No, I'm not bipolar. My thyroid went wonky several years back, eventually went cancerous and I had to have it yanked out. I've been cancer free for several years now. Knock wood... After the yanking out, it was a process of getting the synthetic thyroid hormone dosage right. The thyroid gland has something important to say about every major function in the body and if the hormone isn't right, your mind and emotions can rollercoaster in really nasty ways.

Combined with that rollercoaster, I was seeing a charlatan doctor for another problem who didn't listen when I told him I was spiraling into depression. He put me on absolutely the worst medicine he could have, just exacerbating the problem. It was the only time in my life when I seriously thought about suicide. It's just not part of my usual personality makeup to do away with myself—just not me. But there was one night there in the midst of that atrocious chemical soup when—if I'd had an easy means to do it—I have no doubt in my mind—even sitting here on a sunny day, balanced, and thinking life is pretty good—no doubt that I really would have done it. I just didn't want to go on. I wanted my life to end right there.

Fortunately, the apathy that is often a major accompaniment to depression was just as strong as the urge to die. The effort involved in getting dressed and leaving the house, finding a means to end it all, just seemed like too much trouble. I compromised by going to bed and praying that I didn't wake up.

All things considered, I'm glad no one listened to that prayer. I'm glad my better angel put his arm around my shoulders and said, "This isn't you talking. It's bad chemistry and this will all seem better by-and-by." I'm glad I woke up. I also got help almost immediately after that because it scared the crap out of me. I went to another doctor, explained what was happening, and she took me off of the bad medicine. Within a few weeks, the depression was gone, all thoughts of suicide gone. I didn't go back to the charlatan doctor. I haven't had a really bad patch of bad chemistry since, but I'm acutely aware of that razor's edge we walk, how a little chemical tweak here and a little tweak there can send our systems seriously out of whack and our emotions out of control.

Spuddy wasn't so lucky. I heard they were trying to adjust his meds but were having trouble getting it right. Bipolar is really tough that way. And when he got on that ferry there was no one to put an arm around his shoulders and say, "It's just bad chemistry, Spuddy." Or maybe there was and he was too tired to listen anymore, too tired of fighting it. No one will ever know, I suppose—certainly not an outsider like me. Did the East River, that broad avenue of bodies for over two hundred years, seem to him like a metaphor for his life? Or the perfect metaphor for his death? Or was it just easy, just there, no reason in his tortured mind and tired spirit not to do it finally, to go to sleep and never wake up?

It's certainly not for me to say. I just hope he's finally found a peaceful sleep.