We went.

They teens loved it (and so did I).

I played some new games (for me): Are you a traitor?, The Resistance, Don't Feed the Shoggoth!! (that last one is as yet unpublished)

I introduced the teens to LARPing via Harry Potter versus Miskatonic University and they went on to play another LARP which they loved and are now plotting to GM their own LARP, possibly of Paranoia.

I played my annual Buffyverse game with Lyle and the pretty awesome GM Michael Kelly. Continuation of the previous saga. Good stuff.

Monday I played Paranoia with Arthur Wallace as the GM. He's a rockstar. Probably best GM I've ever played with. And I got my first RP award in the game which surprised me. I tend to be fun to play with, but not the rockstar of the group. The game used the Super Mario Bros characters: Mari-O, Luigi, Yosh-I, Don-K-Y Kong, etc. I played Peach-Y SIS, the only female character. So I got to do a lot of girly-girl ridiculous things and really play with the male characters. It was very fun. Apparently they enjoyed it too.

I hope to get to play with them or with those characters again.

The result is that I'd love to find a gaming group. Not for a campaign, though Kiddo would love that. I'm thinking more a games night, locally with folks who'd like to play fun games and laugh a lot.

I often don't write here about the really good things that are happening. I've been focusing really hard on getting well and writing about things like the moods swings as they happen. It seems to give people the impression that my life is terribly difficult which isn't true.

On the contrary, aside from the medical stuff, my life is pretty great. My son is happy, healthy and smart and progressing in his life. I'm doing interesting and fun things. I have an absolutely amazing boyfriend who's love has changed my life. There's something about the way he is with me that I can really let in his love and love myself more fully. (He also doesn't take crap from me which is also hot.)

On Friday we were talking and I had gotten into a bit of a mood and was about to be self-pitying. I said, "I'm..." and he jumped in with, "perfect." It made my day. In fact it's made the last few days.

I write here because writing releases something inside me, not because it creates a full picture of my life.

The last few days have been delightful. The thyroid meds seem to be working. I upped the mood support stuff and so I'm feeling pretty joyful and productive even. Not perfect. But I found a Starbuck's close to home where I can go and focus. I've been indulging in self care and working on finding and organizing work. I've been spending time with my amazing son and prepping for upcoming fun.

Last night I went to a party, which is pretty rare. When I go to parties I enjoy them, and I got to see a number of people I haven't seen in a long time which was delightful Parties can be a way to see lots of people at once and that's good for me as my time is pretty limited given all that I'm trying to do right now.

But my life is pretty good. A lot of life is really my attitude and when my brain is broken and I'm not getting the right nutrients, I'm really moody. When I am it's fantastic and I am happy and grateful for no reason which feeds an upward spiral.

I started new thyroid meds about 1.5 weeks ago. It took a couple of days, but I woke up feeling a lot better on Saturday and it's been mostly an upward trend.

Until today.

I have more energy, am doing more things, applying for more work, sleeping less, getting some shit done.

But the yesterday and today I'm noticing mood stuff. Today my mood has been ALL over the place. I felt amazing last night after a HAI mini workshop that I was on team for. But today in the middle of talking to the boyfriend I just started melting down, apathy, overwhelm, pain, sadness, .... crash.

I feel like I need to be getting things done, the house is a mess, I need work, I'm .... melting. So I took myself out to lunch on the way to poll worker training.

Yesterday my pants fit a little different than they have been so I'm wondering if this is the beginning of body shifting things for reals (which I'm totally available for) and I wonder if what's happening is revisiting things as my body changes. I don't know that for sure, but in meditation today, that's the message that I received.

I have another appointment on Tuesday and we'll change things up again, I'm sure.

At least I'm not sleeping three hundred hours a day or totally crashed out. In fact I'm writing from a coffee shop where I can focus and get things done away from Kiddo. Hopefully those things will include something other than the Book of Face and journaling.

As of Thursday 4/26/12, we re-adjusted meds. So now I'm taking something that is very similar to a pharma grade thyroid med. It's a lot stronger than what I was taking before. A lot.

Immediately my appetite went waaaaay up and my energy started to rise too. It took until Saturday after an even nap to feel it.

The down side is that I'm higher strung than I've been. So I'm way more active and tolerating Kiddo's mood a lot less. This seems to be the trade off. I think this is where the adrenal stress comes in. I'm much more short with him about stuff.

Maybe it's the pain. I'm still having back pain. Now it's upper back and lower back, and that makes me short with people. But I now have the energy to move - lower back pain for me that is not kidney issues is helped with walking.

One of the things that I can do is to listen to my body and know how much of a pill to take. I upped my dosage of the new thyroid med (it's by Biotics and it's called GTA somethingorother). I picked up the pill bottle and it's like it pulls at me and when I have the right number in my hand, the pull is satisfied.

I chalk this up to doing so much applied kinesiology and NAET that my body is used to tell me dosages. I wonder if this happens to other people. I can do it with food too if I'm listening. I pick it up and things happen, like I'll get slightly nauseated if it's bad or my breathing will be very clear and strong if it's good.

My healer also added a supplement called Chezyn which is minerals to support iron absorption and anemia. She did some research about anemia and found something that would help. Because no matter how much iron I take, it hasn't fixed the problem - either the symptoms or the underlying issue. So this one has things in it like zinc and copper and enzymes that will help me change the way I metabolize iron.

We also did some dosage finding AK. So for the Hemevite and iron, tracking those along with my cycle so that they increase the week before I bleed is our current plan. This is what i've tried to do before, but the dosage is still less than I need. I seem to need 4 times the regular dosage during menses and the week before. That's a huge difference. I typically doubled it. Apparently I need to quadruple it. That's good to know.

By the way the down side for me about the thyroid meds working is that I need to eat, like absolutely must have food, no less than every 4 hours. And I wake up starving. It doesn't sound terrible, but for someone who's very used to not eating for 8+ hours, it's really hard. It's gotten easier over time. But last week and the week before as the Thyroxal stopped working (or wasn't working enough or...) my appetite went away. That's been my state of being for more than a decade so when it came back over the weekend, it took me by surprise.

I can't just "have a snack" every few hours, I need to sit down in front of food and eat a meal. At least 4 times a day. Granted those meals are half the size or less than what I would eat at other, non-working thyroid times. But they are not optional. I get headaches when I don't eat enough and my belly aches and my throat gets hungry and my brain stops working.

I think it's time to explore some recipes so that I have a wider repertoire again.

Oh and I passed the NAET for iron even though I was bleeding the second time through. So hopefully this next month my body will be able to take in enough iron to keep me from being in bed for a week. We'd like that.

One of the things I remember from before I was sick is that I really like people and that I used to be good at them. (Kind of like knitting or woodworking, except less exact and more squishy.)

One of the things that's been happening the last two months is that I am connecting with individual people agin and having a lot more friend dates in person not just email exchanges or group outings/events/rituals.

For all that people think I'm an extrovert, I do a lot better one on one with my friends than at parties or social events. I feel less lost and like an observer individually. My reactions feel more normalized (for me) and much more so in the last 8 weeks.

I've had a couple of people tell me recently that they think I'm popular. I think they're seeing the piece of me that's "extroverted." I really thrive when I have enough contact with people and that I deeply enjoy those connections. So my time is quite full and I'm very clear about spending time with Kiddo as well where as before I would fit it in where I could and that didn't work. Clarity and boundaries work for me.

It used to be that I'd tell people that my super power is that people tell me things. That's true.

But it's not because of my cape or my cool outfits (well, mostly). I think I've identified what what's for people I know: I reveal things about myself and I accept them as they are. Except when I don't which makes me human.

The skill that makes group dynamics the most difficult for me is feeling like no one else is sharing their truth and thus not feeling seen, heard, and met. One on one relationships are all about that deeper connection and so I can thrive and play and be my warm-hearted self. And I'm happier if I can just be who I am and worry less about people's reactions. So one-on-one increases my ability to do that.

This is part of my quest to find my genius and redefine my work and what I want to be doing for money. That seems to be shifting some and so there's some "embrace the mystery" moments happening over here.

I trained Kiddo from very young to ask him self HALT (Hungry, Angry, Lonely, Tired?) when he's upset or tantruming. It was pretty effective to get him and I to both slow down and figure out what was happening when he was younger.

Now there are no tantrums. He does do Sullen Teenaged Boy Sulking on occasion, which I'm sometimes even entertained by. But it is also an opportunity to ask about feelings, needs and choices.

Food, and specificallys tabling blood sugar does a world of good for moods. Last night I was feeling sadness and I had a moment of wanting to stop on my way home and buy food. I stopped myself because my head said, "Hey, wait, this is emotional eating." And my tummy said, "It's true, we're not hungry." So I smiled happily to myself, mood lifted slightly and drove home.

Well 40 minutes later as I approached home, I was hungry and did stop for food and it also lifted my mood.

What I realized is that it's a fine line between emotional eating to stuff emotions, and making sure to eat enough so that emotions aren't exasperated by blood sugar drops. Which brought me round to remembering that all this stuff that I'm going through has a biological reason. My body is trying to keep me alive.

If I am not in touch with my hunger, and I don't know if I'm hungry because that bit of my body doesn't work, it's a reasonable and possibly useful reaction to eat when there are big emotions. It's a signal that something is wrong. It does turn into food problems eventually because it's using poor signaling as a substitute for self care. But the underlying thing my biology is trying to solve, "Keep her from dying" can be temporarily solved by making sure that I eat food if hunger things aren't working but I'm receiving other potential food-related signals.

Putting this together last night gave me space to forgive myself for emotional eating. And if you'e never struggled with that you might not know that the other half of that cycle is guilt when I realize that I've eaten too much or the wrong thing and feel like I "should" or want to be doing it some other way but couldn't do it.

The truth is that this is a biological issue and I'm not bad or wrong or horrible. And forgiving myself for having made mistakes in the past means that I can be more present in the future. I can eat what I need when I need it and not worry about what might happen. Worrying just leads to guilt cycles.

I wish I could say that I did this all through reading some book and it's the solution to emotional eating for everyone, for ever. But this has been resolved by doing a lot of talking and reading and research and also taking supplements and seeing my doctor every couple/fews weeks.

I feel like the OA people and the people who say, "fat is bad!!!!!!" need to get the message about biology. Addictive behavior is a brain chemical issue. Weird eating things are complex chemical and biological issues. It's also not at all clear that people are even all designed to be a certain size to begin with. (And it's clear that I'm still struggling with mainstream correlations of health and wellness and body size even with the available research. I hate the my body is a political battle ground.)

For me, the biology piece feels a lot more solvable than just, "Use you're willpower or you're a bad person." We know willpower is largely a myth. We know that more than 90% of diets fail. We know medically that dieting is not a solution. But since I've been able to change so many other things in my life sometimes it feels like I "should" be able to just do it. Re-framing my success is very helpful. Remembering integrated systems need to be supported together and not separately as the allopaths would try to do.

However, again and again I find that things change as I heal one body thing or another, one piece at a time, over time. My healer told me that this path is a long one and I didn't realize just how long it would be when I made my commitment to healing nearly 7 years ago.

So right now it's thyroid and thymus with lots of support for absorption, digestion and actually taking the nutrients that my body is not making itself. Now that I am absorbing those nutrients, it's a game changer. Even a few days off my supplements and in sadness with a relationship thing, I'm still fine. I am having emotions, but I get how people can get up every day and keep moving. I still don't think it's healthy to keep moving without acknowledgement of what's so, but I see it's possible.

I hesitate to say these things out loud because it sometimes sounds so dire. It was dire and I am still vigilant about it, possibly more than necessary, I really don't know. But it's great to be able to look back and see how far I've come and how the healing work I have done has made such a huge difference in my life.

Kiddo loved hanging with the dog, once the dog stopped being depressed. Today especially they have been bouncing around and Brandy has been climbing all over Kiddo and I. It's pretty great. Especially since Friday night she wouldn't have anything to do with us.

I have managed to take supplements, but I'm not quite back up to full doses. Traveling is always hard on that for me. So I'm going to make an effort take take my evening dose when I'm done here and to sleep extra well and late tomorrow morning.


I've been off my second iron supp because I left in at home. So we'll see how it feels to take that tomorrow. I am pretty low energy. I don't know if that's because it's hell hot here or if it's the iron.

Some will be happy to hear that Kiddo has decided he's obsessed with cello music. It's been coming on for a while, but we sat and went through lots of it this weekend and we have some resources to explore when we get home. I didn't realize just how much I know about music. There is a lot of basic music things in my head that I learned growing up and taking lessons that I started passing on to him as well as movies, artists, styles and so on. I feel competent to start/deepen his music education to a point. It's very re-assuring. I'll take it!

We also re-designed our apartment while we were here and made decisions about more things to get rid of and how to move piece of furniture around in our small space to be more of what we want. I've been getting rid of ton of stuff, but Kiddo hasn't very much. A lot of that is because I haven't sat with him for very long to make it go and he starts but won't progress unless I'm on top of him/working with him. But it sounds like he wants to and that's exciting for both of us. He wants the space to be nicer and is becoming more available for that as I do more of it myself. Yay!

Ok, tired now. Maybe I'll nap while waiting for Puppy-Daddy.

So I started eating what I wanted this afternoon and it seems fine. I haven't taken supplements yet (but will with dinner) and didn't have any major issues this morning aside from the dream and lethargy. The dreams being different, I'm told, is a sign that I'm detoxing and I'll take it, even if it's sad and painful.

Being able to be less reactive to iron so that my body will actually absorb it should give me a lot more energy in the long run. I'll be confirming test results on Thursday and re-treating if I didn't clear it entirely. Sometimes I clear a piece but not all of it which I don't quite understand, but it is true that once I've cleared something for reals, it stays clear most (greater than 95% of the time).

Oddly, I'm not crashed out, the blood sugar meds are holding (at least temporarily) and although today has been a bit challenging, all is essentially well. My mood is still stable even though I haven't taken meds in 24 hours. I'm still up for tonight's birthday party.

(We're dog sitting in Palo Alto and the puppy is sad so Kiddo is sad and that makes my day a little bit harder. Also a large parcel of my friends are at a workshop and I have a work deadline that I've been avoiding. Plus the mom-dream stuff and the boyfriend breaking stuff and it's a lot. The BF is ok by the way, but he's really, really sad. And there's nothing I can do about it.)

Usually before my period I have nightmares at least one night. Usually they are about being stalked by a serial killer in various ways or the house broken into and I wake up and over and over again and get more and more scared because I'm not actually waking up.

Yesterday and today I woke up crying.

Yesterday it was a scene about my sister leaving and Easter basket present that is lead to with dark red jello that looks like gore. It's for my mom and then I realize that my mom mis dead and I get more and more sad and wake up crying.

In reality my mom is not dead, but she's very very ill with Alzheimer's and doesn't talk or feed herself or go to the bathroom on her own.

Todays' was another series of fear of mine, I was cleaning up and the group left and i stomped off. Then an old friend Trinity was there who wanted to see me and then the group caught up with us and we were going down a narrow set of stairs. People started coming towards me and I felt trapped, I knew there wasn't going to be enough space for us to pass. I got pushed against a wall and eventually got out.

Then the group moved on, having no idea I was traumatized and I got a little lost and nearly fell down a very steep slope that had been changed in a previous dream. It was terrifying (and falling down has been a huge fear the last couple of years.) I curled up in a corner against some stairs. Someone did notice, but they went away and no one else seemed to realize that I was terrified and needed help. I cried and tried to cry loud enough for someone to hear, but I couldn't. Literally I couldn't make any noise. I eventually was able to stand up and as I past a few people they looked at my scraggliness in near horror. Then I woke up crying and disoriented.

Unlike in the movies, I don't worry about going to sleep or worry about night mares. Maybe because they only happen a few nights a month at the most.

I know that dreams are related to kidney function and we've been treating kidney stuff and so this has changed from previous months from terror to sadness and from the absurd to real issues. I'm glad it's changing, but waking up so sad makes it hard to get anything done at all.

Saturday will be 8 weeks of the new regimen. I am taking a kind of break from it today and tomorrow because of the NAET treatment.

I'm sleeping about 9-10 hours a night.

I am slowing having more motivation. I did several difficult things today that were about clearing out old energy from relationships that I have allowed to sit and stagnate (meaning I haven't spoken my truth so I've done the Avoidance Dance). So far that has gone well.

The last couple of days there has been a lot of sweets in the house and with cake on the counter I seem to walk by and have a bit. It's really clear that if I'm going to keep sweets in the house that they cannot sit on the counters or they will be my first line of defense against hunger.

I can have good food habits, I just need to make sure those are the accessible things.

I've decided it's ok to eat frozen food and so my freezer has been full of things that I can eat that are at least marginally good for me (asparagus risotto, stir fry veggies, chicken pot pie), that I can just take out and cook in a few minutes and shove in my face when my blood sugar is crashing. This is a successful strategy.

I'm eating eggs for breakfast nearly every day and given up yogurt for breakfast. It's not bad for me exactly, I ass nuts and stuff to it, but it's sweetened and the more I just stay away from sugar all together, the better off I am.

Now the issue isn't so much mood, though I notice I still get grumpy on too much sugar, it's that I can feel it in my body. It makes my tummy unhappy and can make me feel light headed. Not overwhelming, but subtle. And what I know is if I don't stop when I feel that I will feel worse.

The fact that I'm feeling into sublet around food is huge. I still want to add lots more veggies, but eating 4 times a day has been the goal and I'm getting there. It happens often, but not everyday and I need to eat first thing in the morning and nor more than an hour before sleeping so that I don't crash out in the night.

And the supplement that I have been taking for that is working really well. Someday ever I could occasionally go 4 hours without eating and not want to throw up. I am still using chocolate milk sometimes. (Have I talked about that? I have 2 foods that I can eat when I'm so lightheaded and sick that I can't eat real food: yogurt and chocolate milk. My body won't accept much else. Interestingly enough they are both liquid and contain protein and sugar, so not terrible choices. Liquid means immediately digestible and the other stuff is what what I should be eating anyway.)

I know I'm not tracking all that often, but I'm talking about it and that's a good thing.