Tag: fatigue

A ride with my son

Nikki Nelson-Hicks

*An excerpt from a ten minute car ride with my son*

“Maybe I shouldn’t tell you this,” my son began, “but I never expected to live past 25.”

I gripped my steering wheel a little tighter. Here we go….. “Okay.”

“Ya know, because of my mental illness and stuff. I always figured I would’ve found a way to off myself by now.”

Just let him talk…. “Okay….”

“So, last year when I hit 26, I decided, well, shit, I guess I need to get my life together and get stuff going, ya know? I started to make plans. All kinds of plans. And then, it was like BOOM. Ya know, if my life was storyboarded out like a comic strip, it would go like this. One panel would be me, looking optimistic, my arms over my head, ready to Carpe the Shit out of that Diem, and then the next panel would be a newspaper floating past with headlines like, “PLAGUE SHUTS DOWN WORLD”. Then in the next panel, it would be me, in a hazmat suit, staring blankly out on a decimated world.”

“Huh.”

“Yeah, I swear, I know that the world doesn’t revolve around me and Covid has really fucked up a lot of people’s lives but sometimes, it feels like my life has been just been leading up to a massive, cosmic punchline.”

“Damn, dude.”

“Yeah…..I know. So, we’re having pizza for dinner tonight?”

Hope is a bitch

Nikki Nelson-Hicks

There’s been a lot of changes in my life recently.

Not so much changes in my life but in the lives around me. Coworkers I’ve been sharing the misery  at the day job  for the past 15 years retiring, friends moving away, and all the usual stuff that makes one start thinking about where they are and if they want to still be in that place during the next solar cycle.

So I decided to do something and look around for a new gig. I wanted something more in tune with me and what I wanted for my future.

And I thought I had found it. It was small publishing house in Nashville. NOT RELIGIOUS, which is a miracle (no pun intended) and they had posted a job that I would be perfect for so I joined up on this online job site, filled out a freaking resume and sent it off into the cyber ether.

I’m not going to lie. It felt a buzz of excitement I hadn’t felt in ages. I started fantasizing about getting the job and how great it would feel to be doing something I love and making new, interesting friends and how my world would just blossom and everything would just start coming up Nik.

mtm
Calm down, Mary. It’s just a hat.

The next day, I waited for an email. It was the caffeine that kept my hopes up. I kept replaying the fantasy, over and over again. Getting a new cool job. Quitting this shitshow. Oh, man, I was gonna love quitting.

quit
buh-bye

But the email never came. What I did get was a fuckton of spam phonecalls.

Yeah.

And the job?

Yeah. Suddenly, that job wasn’t on the website.

But the spam? That shit kept on coming.

Yeah.

So, I got got. Just another victim of Hope laid out by the Internet.

Meh. C’est la guerre.

My day job is soul sucking, lonely and has absolutely no future but, what the fuck. It pays the bills.

There’s always the Great American Novel dream, right?

psycho
Right.

 

 

Bad Butterfly

Nikki Nelson-Hicks

At my last physical, my doctor called me his most boring patient because, other than hypertension and cholesterol, I was healthy for a 53 year old.

A week later, I get a chirpy little message from someone in the doctor’s office, “Hey, your blood tests say you have hypothyroidism. You need to come in and see about treatment. Okay, bye!”

Well, hell.

So, a little backstory: 8 years ago, I was really, really sick. My heart was beating like a hummingbird. I couldn’t sleep. My bones felt like they were vibrating inside my skin. I just felt crazy. After a week or two of testing, turns out I had hashitoxicosis. In a nutshell, my body was attacking my thyroid and it was fighting back. In doing so, it was shooting out T-3 and T-4 hormones like a Gatling gun and causing me to become hyperthyroid.

I was put on beta blockers and a few months and blood tests later, I was deemed Thyroid Healthy.

But I wasn’t. Not really. The damage had been done.

The trauma from that past sickness had taken its toll and now it wasn’t playing the game anymore. Give it props; it had chugged along on three cylinders for 8 years before throwing up the white flag.

And looking back, it makes a lot of sense. The depression, crushing fatigue and weight gain that I’d been blaming on menopause or faulty brain wiring was really caused by a fucked up thyroid.

20180916_182857
Artist rendition of Bad Butterfly bogarting all the good stuff. Bitch.

What does that mean for me?

A lifetime of synthetic hormones to replace the ones my Bad Butterfly refuses to give up.

So, I’m going to use this space not only as a soapbox to shill out my books but also as a place to plot my journey dealing with this new turn in my life.

Maybe I can shed some light into someone else’s life.

To be continued.