Today I Learned...

When I went on cortisol (for the hypoadrenia), I immediately felt better. In fact, I immediately felt awesome in ways that were somewhat frightening. For the first week, I didn't need to eat, I was sleeping 4 hours a night, and my apartment was *spotless*. This backslid into a much healthier "better than when I started", but never near the highs of the first week.

The first week on Armour Thyroid, I didn't feel a bit of difference. But slowly, I noticed that while my energy level was the same, I wasn't eating much sugar, and I'd dropped caffeine entirely. And while the much celebrated thyroid medication weight loss hasn't materialized, I'm almost positive I'm gaining muscle. My quads are more defined, there's a bigger shadow when I flex my bicep, and my bra bands are fitting tighter while the cups are looser. I am extraordinarily happy with this outcome; it could only be more perfect if it increased my flexibility as well.

This week, I got sick. I think I recovered faster than I would have without Armour, but without a control universe I'll never know. What I do know is that Sudafed is an entirely different drug now. I used to be able to take it before bed no problem, now I totally see how it's related to meth. Also, even if the pharmacist says sudafed and ibuprofen will not interact with your thyroid meds, and your doctor says to take cortisol when you're sick, do not take all three of them. You will be super jumpy for an hour and feel awful when the cortisol wears off.

I'm wearing contacts off and on- my left eye really doesn't seem to be taking well, but that one's hardly impaired at all, so if I can treat the much milder dryness in my right eye it should be extremely workable. Certainly enough for martial arts, hopefully eventually for longer periods.

But the weird thing is how few people notice that a major feature of my face is missing. I've gotten no outright "where are your glasses?" and exactly one "you look different." The friend who notices every posture change, who sees improvements in my skin that even I hadn't, and who I'd been talking to on line about the contacts for day?, didn't notice.* Which leads me to believe that everyone knows Clark Kent is superman and they're just being polite about it.


*I checked and she genuinely didn't notice, it's not that she didn't want to draw attention to how horrible I look without glasses.

I have Issues with Dentists. Most of these stem from the cavity-replacement-with-incomplete-anesthetic, two root canals, wisdom teeth removal, and jaw surgery that arose in three years between breaking my jaw and getting a diagnosis ("that nerve ain't right", or as they put on insurance forms, trigeminal neuralgia) and (good if incomplete) treatment, but there's also all those hygienists who implied the fact that my gums hurt when they stabbed them was due to my moral failings (in failing to floss), and some overlap in the hygienist who heavily implied I had brought on and deserved the pain that would eventually be diagnosed as neuralgia because I didn't floss. There's also just been a number of just generally crappy dentists and hygienists.

Today I saw a(nother) new dentist, this one recommended by my fabulous endodontist. She took 40 minutes to just go over my case history and intertwined anxiety issues. She's not perfect- I "need" to tell her if a hygienist stresses me out, rather than her welcoming it- but I'm putting it down to language issues. Which is probably not true, she has a Westernized first name, no accent, and all her educational credentials are from the US, but it makes me feel better. Ditto for her telling me she's "hesitant" to treat me because she's afraid of being the latest dentist to fail me. I think of hesitant implying you need to be convinced to do something, but she seems to be on board, just requiring a lot of communication from me. Which is fair.

One possibility she brought up was anesthetizing me for cleanings. Originally I rejected this out of hand, because I'm Good With Pain, it's Their Fault They Suck, etc. Now I'm considering it. However good I was with dental pain at age 20, dental visits are one big ball made of stress and control issues and stress aggravated pain disorders now. I'm not ready to pursue medication until I've tried some other things first, and have enough trust in the dentist that I can afford to spend a visit drugged, but if the first doesn't work and the second is true, and a few pills will move me to a better equilibrium, that seems worth it.

All the talking only left 10 minutes for the actual exam, and we didn't even get to the teeth. She started with the outer muscles of the face and jaw (which I did really well on) and then the interior soft tissue. She noticed marks on my cheek that indicate I am constantly sucking on my own mouth (which was not news to me), which apparently can do long term damage (did not know that). I go back next week, hopefully we get to my teeth then, but maybe not, and even then that's just the exam, not the cleaning. This is where I'm really blessed to have money. My insurance only covers half of her new patient exam, and the extra appointments are getting billed as "consults", which insurance doesn't even appear to have a category for. I don't expect them to cover the cleanings 100%, and I may need them more frequently than insurance will cover at all- partially because my teeth are that bad (due to genetics, not neglect), but partially because she's willing to consider giving me less thorough cleanings to avoid stressing me out. It's not cheap. And I'm really lucky that I don't have to add monetary anxiety to the ball o' issues, or weigh the neuralgia anxiety against the cost of a chance of buying my way out of them.

But here's the part that makes up for all of her slightly-anxiety-producing-statements-I-pretend-are-caused-by-language issues. At the end of the session, she thanked me, because she could tell that treating me was going to stretch her as a dentist and make her better with her other patients.

Martial arts aside: we spar with contact. It hurts. Sometimes a lot. I find the pain a lot worse when I don't think the person who inflicted it is controlling it (I'm looking at you, jackass who hit me in the head four times and didn't appear to care). To the extent that we can, the attitude we aspire to is to accept the pain as a gift that shows us where are defenses are weakest, and on a more abstract level, pushes us to examine ourselves. I'm good but not great at this (see: whining over jackass).

One of the real value-adds to my life from martial arts is that it's a font of metaphors. Clearly the above translates to the rest of the world really well, and so does being present and reacting to things as they are, my attitude towards hitting softly in case you miss and hit hard or in the wrong spot. When I'm doing things at work or socially that require having no expectations and moving forward despite an absence of information, I picture chi sau, which I haven't even learned yet but the one really big guy keeps using against me to great result even though he could clearly kick my ass just by swinging his enormous legs.

So when my prospective dentist says that she's scared of treating me because failure seems so likely and so high cost, but is moving forward in part because it's a growth opportunity for her, that touches something in me. It makes me more likely to commit to riding out the stress with this one rather than leaving in pursuit of the perfect dentist who will make up for all the failures before her.