I am really dreading getting older. I have dealt with a variety of physical ailments and accidents in my life and have done okay with pain, although I certainly don't LIKE it! I have some unsurprising issues due to my age that I am also dealing okay with. One aspect of aging that kind of scares me is the mental deterioration. It's okay to make jokes about forgetting things but I have always loved to learn. I get a "high" from inputting new data into my brain. I have had one problem throughout my life with my brain that is likely to get worse and that scares me. I get lost. Whatever that internal GPS is that my husband and my older daughter have that allows them to figure out where they are, how they need to go to get where they want to be, and where they parked their car- I don't have that.
Friday morning Russ was taking a friend to a hospital for a procedure so I went on a walk by myself. The plan was to just take the circuit we have been taking daily for a couple of weeks now. Things didn't go according to plan. To give myself some credit, we have only lived in this neighborhood for a month or so and Sun City planners included a multitude of golf courses necessitating lots of dead ends, circles, and streets that don't go straight. I was walking along and suddenly realized things up ahead didn't look familiar. So I thought, I must have missed my turn and I turned. Awhile later I recognized that I was at the same intersection I had been in before. I had walked in a circle! The end result was that my 45 minute walk turned into an hour and 45 minutes before I finally managed to find my way home. I had taken my cell phone but between the brightness of the sun reflected on the screen, my lack of familiarity with my new "smart phone" , and not having my reading glasses (one of the older-age issues), I couldn't see it well enough nor could I manage to figure out how to use the GPS feature or to call someone who might be able to help me figure out where I was. So I just kept walking. I am truly grateful for the health and strength I enjoy so walking on and on was not a problem. The good people we are currently living with while awaiting our departure time for our mission had gotten concerned about me and called my phone just as I was finally safely within sight of the house. I propped up my feet for a few minutes before leaving for my doctor's appointment.
It would take WAY more time and space to describe how frustrating our doctor visits have been since we started final preparations for our upcoming mission. Suffice it to say, when we first started going to our current doctor's office, it wasn't like this. So I got to the office at 8:15 for an 8:30 appointment only to find the door locked with a sign saying they were moving their office. I knocked because I could see a girl sitting in the office doing paperwork. She let me in and I could see everything had been taken off the walls and the place was pretty well empty except for some chairs and her computer, phones, and stacks of files. Between incoming calls, she explained that she had called me 3 times and asked if I had checked my messages. At first I thought it was my fault due to my not yet knowing how to use my new phone. Then I found out she had been calling the house phone that had been disconnected last November. I had made it a point to go in person to the doctor's office (because of all the complications we had already gone through) with our new contact information, clearly written out on a piece of paper. Apparently no one had logged it into the computer. So, the doctor wasn't there and wasn't going to be there so I wasn't going to be seeing him. I asked for a copy of my most recent lab work so I could know if the medications were doing what they were supposed to do. Because I was at Angela's in Louisiana when my synthroid ran out and the doctor would not extend the prescription without seeing me, I had been without it for a month before I saw him in February. He wanted blood work done again before we leave for our mission then was going to see me to make any necessary adjustments. I had the blood drawn a week ago but the lab had not yet sent over the results so she called and got the results faxed over and gave me a copy. The most "out-of-whack" element, highlighted by the lab, in my blood chemistry was my thyroid level. My TSH level which according to the lab should be between 0.45-4.50 was 46.52. I went home and looked up on the internet information to understand what that meant. Apparently TSH is a measurement of the requests sent out by the pituitary gland for the thyroid to put out more thyroxin. In 1974, I had "97%" of my thyroid removed due to overactivity. I have now been on a supplement since about 1980 or so, except for the time I was at Angela's in January. The blood work was a month after re-starting the supplement. There was also a test for T4 free molecules which are actual thyroid hormone. The normal range is .8-1.7 because it's usually not very much. Mine is .9 so it's not really as bad as it could be. I'm planning to see a doctor when we get to Nauvoo.
All in all, I'm glad we ended up going to see the movie "Do You Believe?" in the afternoon because my day didn't start out all that well. The movie was so uplifting. It really comes down to simply keeping on keeping on. There are ups and downs, sometimes more extreme than others. We might as well trudge on and it's awesome to be loved. As it says in Ecclesiastes, "To everything there is a season.." - a time to laugh and a time to cry, a time to fly and a time to grit your teeth and just keep putting one foot in front of another. The very best part is, we aren't ever alone in the good times or the bad. Friends, family, loved ones all around are just the greatest blessing we have. I am greatly blessed. I am thankful.
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