Things

Things that are super about my life right now:

• I'm headed off on Wisconsin vacation #2 tomorrow where I will be fed free meals and delicious Wisconsin beer will rain down on me like...well...rain, I guess.
• I started taking ballet class again and remembered why I freaking LOVE to dance and never want to leave it for a long period of time again.
• My Kinvaras are the most ballerific running shoes I have ever worn, they are like little pillows of happy on my feet and I feel more fluid, faster, and generally better when I wear them.
• The BF and I finally took the leap into the 20th century and got legit cable.  Which means doing things like watching a 4 hour marathon of Hoarders/Intervention, or what I like to call "the train wreck that you can't look away from special".
• It is not 100 degrees outside.
• I just finished "Unbroken" and it totally lived up to the hype.

Things that are not so super about my life right now:

• I have to have surgery. 
• See above.

So I actually debated for quite awhile over whether I was going to put anything about this up on the blog or not, but then my good friend Nicole made the very wise comment that "not telling people doesn't make it not real". And thus, I tell the abridged version, anyway.  See a couple of months ago, I started to have a weird sensation in my neck when I would run hard/when I was breathing hard.  Honestly anyone who isn't quite as big of a hypochondriac as me probably would have been like whatevs, but I felt around and found this little ball right in the middle of my neck. I didn't really have time to deal with it since I was on clinical but I mentioned at a routine doctor's appointment in July and soon enough I was being referred to an endocrinologist because it turns out it was on my thyroid (yes...I did take anatomy, why do you ask?)...which is where things really got fun.  I had an ultrasound, followed by an "I'm sure it's nothing, but we should biopsy it anyway"...followed by a phone call the next day of "well, it's suspicious, it might be thyroid cancer, you need surgery." BAM.  It was like being hit by a train. Oh, did I mention that this all went down as I'm walking through a semi-sketch neighborhood of Boston after a day of jury duty on which I got picked for the jury and then had to call the defendant not guilty? Well it did. Which obviously make the whole situation even better.

To me, who has been blessed to live a pretty carefree life, this was a huge blow.  I look in the mirror and I think - how could this person, who is a runner, a smart person, who eats well, avoids self destructive activities and almost anything that could be considered "bad for you" - even MAYBE have cancer? And I cried. I yelled. I played the 'why me' game - and after all, aren't all of my friends off enjoying their summers and scrubbing in to observe surgeries, not have them? I drank to excess a couple of times because it made me feel better.  And then, after about a week of wallowing, I stopped. Just like that. Because really, what good is it doing me to make myself completely miserable? I am not alone - the PT I worked with this summer actually went through this same deal, as did one of my friends on DailyMile.  And if I injured myself and had to have surgery for that, would I really be throwing this huge fit about it? No, because I would be like "well, I will have the surgery, and it will fix me!"  And essentially, this is the same thing, it's just harder because I don't FEEL like I need to be fixed.   But sometimes you just have to put on your big girl pants and deal with it.

So the big girl pants are on, and as of August 25 I will be minus 1 thyroid.  Not entirely sure what this means for XC season yet (it can take awhile to titrate hormone levels to a point where you actually feel normal, although I keep telling myself that I'll be lucky and my body will just figure it out), but all I know is that when I PR at Boston, having gone through all this shit will make it all the more sweet.