Perhaps one of the biggest mysteries of my adult life has just been solved, I think.

To back track, I loved my mom in a lot of ways (and by the way, Pat would have balked at my invoking the word love in her direction, forget about publicly, that would have been inexcusable), but in so many ways her irrational…I don’t know the word to use… phobias, maybe, but also belief system, whatever it was, it was infuriating. The saddest thing about her death, which I think affected a lot of people, most especially her siblings, was the sense it didn’t have to be. Not like with a sudden tragedy, act of god, car accident dramatic sense of it didn’t have to be. No, a literal couldn’t this whole thing have been avoided somehow feeling. Maybe I’m not explaining it well, but throughout the funeral and still to this day, you almost couldn’t, can’t help comparing other women her age (or the age should would have been) and thinking “Hey, they’re alive and doing stuff, why isn’t she?” She allowed her life force to just slip away.

There were symptoms, harbingers of the reality, something just ain’t quite right. Hair loss (and I don’t mean thinning I mean long gone), dessicated skin, appetite issues, chronic pain and wearing sweaters in June. The pain was epic and omnipresent. Walking ached and ached some more over that. (She always said she was arthritic, and she had been treated sometime circa 1964 for it. She never had any of the swollen, gnarled joints of arthritis, and who the fuck knows where medical science was 40 fucking years ago. The weird part is it was always about walking and her legs, but not about her knees, and almost to the end she used her hands to build dollhouses, still able to grip and lift.)

And, of course, there was the chronic depression, which could have been the angst of her ancestors, who wrote poetry and drank and described a bitter and real life and made themselves miserable and wonderful simultaneously (at least, I guess, that’s what I think of when I think of people like Joyce and Shaw). Maybe it was depression with cause, like the three people I know who broke a little bit of her irreparably when they died (a brother, a husband and a boy, essentially part son, part grandson, but it’s complicated). And, those losses were the big ones, the earthquakes. There were more and more life things conspiring against her, sometimes you could almost think, who wouldn’t be depressed?

But, today, with one phone call that’s part worry and relief, all of the questions are answered. It’s all just a fucking hormone. A slight imbalance, adjustable and maintainable by modern medicine.

I’ll stop being all philosophically, bullshitty and cut to the chase, my sister called. She’s not been feeling well (the depth of that statement is really only just being revealed). Finally, she went to the doctor, who was shocked to find she is rocking the charts with record high scores in whatever the test is that comes up hypothyroid!

So, what if you have hypothyroid problems, what happens? From here I got this list:
Fatigue
Weakness
Weight gain or increased difficulty losing weight
Coarse, dry hair
Dry, rough pale skin
Hair loss
Cold intolerance (can’t tolerate the cold like those around you)
Muscle cramps and frequent muscle aches
Constipation
Depression
Irritability
Memory loss
Abnormal menstrual cycles
Decreased libido

I don’t know about the constipation, menstrual cycles or libido, because we weren’t the kind of family to ever talk about that stuff, but I’ll vouch for the rest as matching the very things Pat worried about most.

Fucking hell, she should have gone to the GODDAMN doctors.