Like a Healthy Animal

For years I have been too warm all of the time. By too warm, I mean the only person too warm in a crowded room at standard room temperature. No lie, I used to set the thermostat at 64 and was comfortable in a t-shirt and jeans, no socks and sitting still for hours.

Then I got thyroid disease, and was pleased (for a while) to be able to get cold. It took a long time for the novelty to wear off, but it did one day mid-winter. It was minus ten out, and I was bundled under a sheet and two comforters, wearing long underwear, a t-shirt, shorts, long sleeved t-shirt, long pants and socks, and I was still shivering. I felt stuggish and tired and awful.

After being treated for an underactive thyroid, I don't get unpleasantly warm, at least not yet, and most times I am comfortable, but I find my back gets cold. This is so strange to me. Part of it is my new shorter haircut, but part of it is a vestage of the havoc auto-immune disease is wreaking on my body.

I don't want this. I don't want to be sick anymore. I want to be well, feel well, be normal, a regular person just like everyone else. I don't want to sink down inside my body anymore, lacking energy, ambition, drive because I am still here, damnit. And for the first time in a long time, I felt pleasantly cold again. I felt well, I felt whole, I felt normal. It was magificent.

I had worked out at the gym. I am a big advocate of Planet Fitness. I find it to be a non-punitive place for people to work on their bodies, develop personalized routines and goals based on giving their bodies what their bodies need. Even when I had stopped all other non-essential spending, I kept my gym membership in the hopes that I would go back. And I have started again.

So, I had worked out. Sweating is a now a sublime experience for me. I have a funny relationship with water. When my bloodsugar was too high, I couldn't get enough of water, and sweated horribly, uncontrollably. Now I sweat, but when I do it means something: that I have worked hard and done a good job. It being a glorious day, I left partway though my workout so that I could finish the walking portion outside.

For the first time since being sick, I walked outside in shorts, even though my skin was wet. Walking kept me just warm enough not to need long pants, but allowed me to feel invigorated by the cold, like a healthy animal playing outside in the spring.

I feel happy and enthusiastic and whole.