Friday July 4, 2008 12:01 AM

Either one of the technicians who handled my bloodwork was smokin' dope or there's been a freakin miracle. But let me back up a little.

I went to see my shrink last week and told him that I was finally put on thyroid medication and diagnosed with Hashimotos. In light of that new information he thinks I may not be bipolar at all. He explained that when you have Hashimotos the condition is usually present but undetected for years and years, and in that time the thyroid gland will surge and wane, surge and wane, back and forth. When it surges, you race. When it wanes, you slow down and get depressed. Therefore, it can mimic bipolar disorder. Once I get stable on the right meds and the right dosage he wants to try backing me off the trileptal slowly and seeing what happens.

Now on to the lab tech smoking dope thing. I'm not sure if I mentioned it before, but right before I started chasing down endocrinologists I begged my primary care physician (and I use that term loosely) to run thyroid bloodwork on me. She said my thyroid was normal but my triglycerides were 434. That's God-awful high. I mean, I should have had sludge running through my veins with a number like that. Because the triglycerides were so high the lab could not even provide a figure on my cholesterol levels. So Ms. Primary Care put me on Lopid, which is a cholesterol-lowering drug. I was supposed to take the drug twice a day, but was only taking it once a day. It's a huge horse pill and makes me gag.

One of the things that Hashimoto's can do to you is make your triglyceride level sky high, which was another reason I was trying to find an endocrinologist who would give me a little respect, which is not easy to do. The staff at Jim's endocrinologist, Dr. Horowitz, refused to even schedule an appointment with me because my TSH test was normal. So I'm through with those bitches. I won't even call there on Jim's behalf anymore...he's on his own with them. So the Lopid I started taking around April, and the thyroid meds were started about six weeks ago. (Still no effect on my new girth, by the way, which I'm not happy about).

So I had my yearly follow-up at Deborah Heart and Lung, and part of that included bloodwork, which I did not fast for because the appointment was at 11:00 a.m. and if anyone thinks I can make it that far into the day without coffee they can forget it. Plus they didn;t say on my appointment sheet what they were testing my blood FOR anyway. Turns out it was for cholesterol, trigycerides, and some other stuff. At the Deborah test my triglycerides are now down to 88 and my total cholesterol is only 137, which is fabulous. I've got a hard time believing that a half-dose of Lopid for a few months would be enough to make that radical of a change. So could the thyroid meds have had something to do with it? Or maybe one of the two tests were screwed up? I don't know, but I'll take it.

But I'm on the pig thyroid for a long time now, and I'm still a lard-ass. And I'm not happy about it. People have said to me, "You're just getting older, etc., etc" and I would buy that if the weight had been a slow creep over a period of time, but TEN POUNDS IN TWO WEEKS? No way. People don't put on that kind of weight in that short a period of time.