Get a hobby they said, that will help distract you from internal noise. A hobby? Ok, let's try a hobby... So next think you know I'm all over Pinterest trying to find what hobbies are available for women in their 30s going through crippling anxiety. Oddly enough, that was too heavy even for Pinterest, a virtually intelligent machine with no emotions, to digest. I had to dumb it down and take out the anxiety portion. I came across this article that had the typical, "start sewing!", "get into baking", "grow a garden", so on and so forth. Then I saw it: "start a blog". This was perfect for someone who is chronically seeking outward validation to temper internal feelings of inadequacy. What I didn't consider was, "what if people don't like it"? After that thought camped out in my brain for a couple of hours I practically came to the conclusion that, if I'm lucky, only 3 people will even come across this website.
So here I am, setting forth on my 3 audience member rant about how liberating it is to put all of your insecurities into the world, or the world wide web, and just let them go. I honestly haven't figured out if it's more liberating or debilitating yet, I think only time will tell. But that's not the point of this specific rant. Or maybe it is? I did title this, "get a hobby". Either way, let's start from the beginning.
Well, let's be honest, no one actually care about the very beginning, so we'll fast forward to when it became "severe". I got pregnant in 2018 and eventually had a beautiful boy. My pregnancy was horrible, I hated it. I didn't feel beautiful, I felt like a whale, and I didn't have that pregnancy "glow", it was literal sweat, because I was hot 24/7. It turns out my blood pressure had been rising throughout my pregnancy and around 7 months it got to the "red zone" of worry. I was tested for preeclampsia and was told I didn't have it. Turns out I had to be admitted a month early into the hospital because I in fact did develop full blown preeclampsia. My son was born early and aside from a brief stent of jaundice, was perfectly healthy, albeit tiny at only 5lbs. I on the other hand, wasn't improving. My blood pressure wasn't going down despite the doctors assuring me everything would go back to normal after the placenta was ejected from my body.
Day two post-partum things got worse and I developed HELLP syndrome. For those of you that don't know, that is when your internal organs literally start shutting down on you and can ultimately cause death. There is literally no treatment for it other than delivery, which I had already done, and to wait and hope my body wanted to recoup. I was lucky, after a couple of days my blood work was better and after a week of being in the hospital they let me and the baby go home. My health problems unfortunately, were just beginning. My blood pressure continued to be high and it was eventually found that I had Hyperthyroidism. My pulse was 120-130 bpm while at rest and I constantly felt like I was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Even with all the medication it subsided my anxiety to a 7 out of 10.
I eventually made the decision to have half of my defective thyroid removed in attempt to be off all medications and had that done February of this year. Not even six months later I started experiencing pretty bad right-sided abdominal pain and had to go to the ER in the middle of a pandemic. Yep, I had appendicitis. Which required emergency surgery. So here I am, two years after my son is born trying to reason with myself that all of my health issues are behind me and then another one crawls up. This happened about a month ago, and since then, I'm convinced I'm in for something else right around the corner. Is it helpful to worry about something that you don't know exists yet? Objectively speaking, no. But I cannot reasonably be objective about myself. So I'm this quest to separate my experiences and feelings from one another and find some sort of reprieve. We shall see how that goes...
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