My Altered Life

So, where have I been since I so rudely left my little blog hanging in cyberspace? Well, as so often happens, my life became…altered shortly after my last posting. In a nutshell, here’s the recap of “my altered life”.

I suffered two miscarriages, one of them particularly devastating. As a result of these losses and the related blood work, I was diagnosed with hypothyroidism and began treatment. (This sounds so simple, but in reality this spanned over the course of a year or more.) I lost 40 pounds as a result of the medication, which motivated me to become more health conscious. I began attending Pilates classes regularly, increasing to 6-7 classes a week. I also began training to become a certified Pilates instructor. Overall, I lost 75 pounds during this time.

 

Then during the winter of 2010-2011 I started feeling really bad. I hurt all the time and had absolutely no energy. Thinking my thyroid medication dosage might be off, I went for routine blood work for my thyroid and received some results that concerned the doctor. Everything in my bloodwork was completely normal except that my calcium was high. Turns out, that’s not as good of a thing as you would think. High blood calcium indicates one of two things – cancer (rarely) or parathyroid disease. (Just to clear things up, the parathyroids have NOTHING to do with your thyroid. They are so-named because of their proximity to the thyroid.) Further research led my husband and I to believe it was indeed parathyroidism. In the course of researching, we stumbled across the leader in parathyroid surgery – Dr. Norman in Tampa, Florida. Last summer, we journeyed to Tampa (we live in NC) to have my parathyroid tumor surgically removed. It was huge. I have the pics to prove it (but I'll spare you those!). They also removed a large thyroid nodule at the same time.

Now you have to know that before traveling to Tampa, I had never flown. Five days post-surgery, I flew to DC to accompany my husband on a business trip. I spent my recovery lounging on the banks of the Potomac being pampered by the Gaylord National Resort. It’s a tough life I lead, I tell you.

OH – and in the midst of the prepping for surgery, traveling blitz…we were buying a new house! A former student of mine is a real estate broker and we are friends on Facebook. She posted one day and mentioned this gorgeous house that she just couldn’t believe was dropping so low in price. I messaged her to ask if we could see it, letting her know we were in no way able to purchase it, that we would just like to take a look at it, etc. We toured it, and I fell in love – four bedrooms, three baths, 3 times the square footage of our then-current home, a fenced in yard for our beasts, hardwood floors throughout, granite countertops and woods for the children to explore. We put in an offer (it was a bank foreclosure) and actually negotiated the offer in a local airport on our way to Tampa. We were signing contracts and faxing them from the Gaylord in DC! This is SO not who we are. We laughed the whole time we were doing it.

So…Here I am again. We moved in October. We are still unpacking and organizing. I have a crafting studio and am thrilled about that. You’ll be seeing more paper crafting here on the blog. I am trying to decorate the house on a shoestring budget, so you will see some of that here too. I am still trying to cook fairly healthy for my family, on a tight budget – you’ll see some of my efforts and meal plans here. And I return to Tampa this summer to have my thyroid removed. (Oh! I forgot to mention that, huh?) Yes, while in the Tampa airport awaiting our flight home, I received a call from my surgeon. They found cancer cells in the thyroid nodule they removed. They needed to remove my thyroid, but due to my parathyroid tumor growing alongside my vocal cord nerve they needed to allow a full year for my nerve to heal.

Please stick around to see what I have in store – one of my first returning posts will be Slutty Brownies. You KNOW you want to know what that’s all about.