Category Archives: health & fitness

A narrative of my journeys with diet, exercise, and various healthcare professionals

mental health, parenthood, the ongoing saga of my job Leave a comment

Week 16, 2026: Where My Head At?

I haven’t been regularly blogging for a while now, and it’s becoming more challenging for me to go back and find when a thing happened. Used to be that my blog was a digital scrapbook of sorts that I could access from anywhere, in parallel with Flickr.

So, as a gift to Future Me, here’s a brain dump of stuff that went on during the week ending 11 April 2026.

Stuck to a permission slip is a yellow sticky note with a hand-drawn piano keyboard. Above it are the words "Major scale" and the letters WWhWWWh to explain whole-steps and half-steps. Below the keyboard drawing is written the phrase "Triads on major scale" and the Roman numerals I ii iii IV V vi vii to denote major and minor chords.
Connor is showing an interest in music theory, so I spent some time before bed one evening explaining the relationship between triads and the major scale.
My hair is finally long enough to pull back and style, so I experimented with this one day before work.

I’ve been keeping a weekly planner/journal for several years, and I find it interesting to go back through prior months or years and see what ideas I had for vacations or what meals I experimented with or what internal crises felt hard enough that I needed to take pen to paper to figure them out. What’s also interesting is looking at how much I update for each day; it tends to slow down over the course of a week, and I can totally tell where I transitioned from actively present to treading water.

This week, that transition started on Tuesday and I was in full-on phoning-it-in mode by Wednesday.

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mental health Leave a comment

Better Than OK Today

This morning, for the first time in a long time, I woke up happy.

I really don’t know why. Maybe it was the after effects of Connor’s choir concert last night. He had a really great time, everybody sounded fantastic, and one of his friends braided his hair backstage before the finale.

Maybe it was because I got a good amount of sleep—deep sleep, anyway. I didn’t get any more overall sleep than I usually do, but I got a lot more deep sleep than normal, if my Apple Watch is to be believed.

At any rate, whatever it was stayed with me all day. I’m not complaining. It really was weird, though: I felt almost normal. I didn’t feel like I was dragging. I didn’t feel that pressing strangeness of this menopause body I’ve been dealing with. I stood up straight and tall all day. I wasn’t tired.

My inner critic never spoke up out of turn. I didn’t guilt trip myself. I didn’t end up playing on my phone to escape boredom.

I want to capture this feeling of okay-ness and bottle it up for later.

I’m actually sitting outside as I write this. Connor is off at the karate dojo, helping out with the kids program. One of his friends who just got a car is going to be driving him home afterward, so that means my evening is completely and utterly free.

Every time this Connor goes out on a Friday, I never know what to do with myself. It’s a little bit silly, but when Connor’s not here, I actually feel a little bit lonely.

Even so, as I’m sitting outside in the evening air, feeling just a little bit lonely, and maybe a little out of sorts, I still don’t feel that usual weight of depression. Maybe it’s because I’m outside. Maybe it’s the angle of the sun and the change of the season. Whatever it is, though, I hope it sticks around. I’m tired of being tired.

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Life With Half a Thyroid: One Year

It’s been just over a year since my hemithyroidectomy, and about three months since I started taking levothyroxine to boost my thyroid hormone levels.

I’ve noticed an upswing in my energy levels since starting thyroid meds, but I’ve also noticed that I seem to be retaining more fluids than before. I feel puffy in my face, and even comfy socks always leave an indent on my ankles.

I asked my specialist if water retention is a side effect of levothyroxine; in response, he asked if I wanted to have my thyroid levels checked. That wasn’t really my question, but sure? I mean, more data points are rarely a bad thing.

The results of the blood test showed normal levels of TSH, Free T3, and Free T4. That’s good news overall, but still doesn’t answer the question of water retention.

Perhaps some clean eating is in my future.

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Life With Half A Thyroid: Month Ten

Self-portrait showing my head and shoulders. I'm wearing a boat-neck sweater that shows off my light-pink thyroid scar.

My follow-up visits with the Nurse Practitioner at endocrinology following my thyroid surgery were unremarkable, which is a good thing. She’d look at my lab work, palpate my neck, ask me about symptoms, and declare me good to go until the next follow-up.

My most recent visit was with the actual endocrinologist. My most recent lab work showed a significant spike in my Thyroid Stimulating Hormone (TSH), while my T4 levels remained on the low end of normal. Since I’d already gotten an education in how hormones work when I went through menopause, I suspected that the higher levels of TSH were a sure sign that I’d be put on thyroid medication — if not now, then eventually.

As suspected, he prescribed a low dose of levothyroxine. Now that I’m already on Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT) for estrogen, adding another hormone to the regime doesn’t seem as daunting as it once did. In fact, I’m looking forward to seeing if it lessens any of the symptoms that could be attributable to my thyroid.

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