Campfyre Stories

So I’ve been taking Synthroid for almost a month now and had my follow up visit with the doctor.  He started by asking me how I was feeling and I told him that I started feeling better within days of taking the 50, but not great.  The 75 again gave me improvement and I feel better now than I have in years, though I still feel like there’s room for more improvement.  He said that was what he was expecting and hoping to hear.

It turns out that my blood work came back normal.  Not even low-normal, much of it was center-normal.  However, based on my symptoms and my improvement on the Synthroid, he feels that he’s made the correct diagnosis and we’re going to continue to fine-tune the dosage in order to figure out where I ought to be.  I’ll finish the rest of the week on the 75, then start 4 weeks on 100.  Unless I have an adverse reaction to the 100 dose, he’ll prescribe me another month of that, then I’ll go for follow-up blood work.  Basically, at this point, we need to find the magic numbers where I’m actually normal so that in the future I can explain what’s going on.

I really like this doctor because he takes the time to explain to me what’s going on and what everything means.  My lipids and cholesterol are all in bad shape, but because he’s sure that it’s my thyroid causing that, we’re ignoring those numbers for now.  Everything else is fantastic – bp, respiration, heart, etc.  I’m in excellent health for a fat smoker (though Dr. Kelleher doesn’t put it in those terms )

I feel so lucky to have found this doctor, who diagnoses and treats based on the symptoms of the individual, rather than by the numbers that come back from the blood work.  It also worries me, though, on a broader scale.  If I do have a serious thyroid problem (which is pretty evident already), with these truly normal test results, I can’t imagine how many doctors I might have had to go through and how far down it would have dragged me emotionally.  After the humiliating and degrading experience I had with Dr. Angelotti, I can only guess that there are a lot of fat women out there who are remaining undiagnosed simply because they don’t want to be further put down and accused of behaviors that don’t necessarily fit them.

I recently came to the conclusion that fat intolerance is the last acceptable form of bigotry in the United States, and it’s a serious problem.  Women, I think, experience it more than men do, since we’re supposed to be petite and pretty and visually pleasing to men, but studies show that fat people (men and women) get paid less and get fewer promotions than thin people.  It’s a serious problem.

I’m lucky in that my weight will probably be largely managed by the Synthroid, but I have serious concerns about the overall issue and it’s something that I think people really need to take a closer look at.  Even I, as a fat chick, judge people who are fat…  usually ones larger than me, usually when they’re eating fast food or taking the bus only a block or two, but it’s not an excuse, it’s (socially) acceptable bigotry and I am guilty of it too. 

It’s something I need to work on.  It’s something we ALL need to work on.

Barack Obama’s election to the office of President of the United States is historic for reasons beyond the color of his skin.  If you listen to the reporters and the pundits, you’ll hear them claim that Obama is the first "post-boomer" president, but it didn’t occur to me until today what that really means.  The generation after the Boomers is Generation X.  Barack Obama is the first GenX president.

And I started thinking about what that means.  Among my generation, there is a very strong feeling of jaded optimism.  We want the world to change, we hope the world can change, but a lot of us have given up on seeing that happen.  We’re the last generation that strongly remembers the Cold War; we’re the generation that saw the introduction of a fatal disease (AIDS) and received comprehensive sex education because of it; we watched in wonder as the Iron Curtain came down, only to learn that there was another, just as scary enemy in the middle east.  We’ve never been without televised politics.  We’ve never been without rock and roll.  We were taught that you get a job and stay there until you retire, but almost as soon as we entered the workforce, we learned that wasn’t the case.  We watched movies and read books and heard stories about the people in the 1960′s who tried to change the world, and we watched that generation become consumed with greed and money, often at the expense of people less fortunate than them.

By the time Barack Obama started school, it was desegregated.  He can’t remember where he was when Kennedy was shot because he was only 2 years old when it happened.  He’s of mixed races, so he comes from a background that bridges the racial divide between the white concept of the world and the black concept of the world.

Where most of us are jaded, he has made every attempt to spark hope in the people who need it most, at a time when we need it most, and he has rallied the world back on our side, at least for now.

He represents the best of what our generation has to offer.

But not only the best of our generation.  He has his indiscretions, but he’s fully admitted to those things that in previous times would have killed a campaign.  Whereas Bill Clinton claimed to have tried marijuana, but not inhaled, Obama told the world about his cocaine use.  I think that many of us forgive him for that, not necessarily because we have done similar things, but because he came out and TOLD US, in fact, without our even asking the question.

It’s that upfront admittance to not being perfect that does elicit a guarded optimism from me.  I don’t think that any president is going to "fix the world" or save it, or in any way come close to that, but it does say to me that this is someone who hasn’t (yet) been spoiled by the political system, who hasn’t allowed the disappointments our generation has been through to lessen his idealism.

There is a song that spoke to me recently, moreso than a song has spoken to me in a long time.

Me and all my friends, we’re all misunderstood.
They say we stand for nothing, there’s no way we ever could.
Now we see everything that’s going wrong with the world and those who lead it,
We just think we don’t have the means to rise above and beat it.
So we keep waiting, waiting on the world to change.
One day our generation is going to rule the population,
Till then we keep waiting, waiting on the world to change.
~John Mayer

And I really feel that.  My mother was disappointed and found it somewhat depressing a sentiment, but I think that Generation X has really been ground down.  What little hope we’ve had has often been dashed, so we learned to stay guarded and to keep jaded and to hope behind a veil of apathy that someday things will be different.

Do I really think that things are going to be different?  Sure, but I don’t know how, and I don’t know that it will be for the better.  What I do know is that beyond a regime change, we are seeing the beginning of a generational shift in the political makeup of the country.  We’re a generation with a different agenda and with vastly different baggage, and I think it’s time we had our chance to see if maybe we can do better than the generation that came before us.

Maybe we can, maybe we can’t, but at least we have a chance to try.

Ok, so I was walking to my polling place on Tuesday.  I’m walking down a two-way street and I approach a 4-way intersection with a working three-color traffic light.  If you turn right, you’re heading the right way down a one-way street.  If you turn left, you’re heading the right way down a one way street.

It’s odd enough in and of itself, I assume there are very few intersections like that anywhere in the country, but it leaves me with a burning question.

Why is there a light?