short fuse

I totally could have reenacted the scene from Office Space where Michael Bolton (not the musician) and his coworkers take the office fax machine out to a field to stomp on it and beat it to pieces with a baseball bat. I’ve been frustrated with technology before, but never to the point that I wanted so badly to pummel a piece of machinery as I wanted to completely obliterate the copy machine this morning.

It’s new to us, but not a new machine. I wanted to make a double-sided copy of a form that I’m using for work. I wanted it on blue paper. These things are usually not monumental requests… but this confangled copier kept getting choked on about every fourth good copy. Each choke required me to take its insides apart, throw three to five pieces of chewed up paper away, wait for it to restart, then repeat the process. After about the sixth time I decided to go somewhere else and use someone else’s machine. But even after I cleared the job and cancelled my project, the copier continued to spit out my copies and get choked on my project. I unplugged it, thinking a hard reset would erase its memory. Finally I apologized to the secretary and asked her to exorcize the copy machine while I went to another copier that finished my job in an appropriate amount of time without getting choked.

I literally had a vision of how nice it would be to run over the damn copier with a monster truck. I wanted to smash it with a sledge hammer. I wanted to melt it at 3,000 degrees Kelvin and watch it burst into flames. I wanted to break each blasted piece of its insides, throw them all into a box, and then call the Xerox guy to come put it back together. I wanted it to suffer a long, slow demise.

Typically I wouldn’t be so frustrated with an inanimate object, but you see, today is my 8th day without any thyroid supplementation. To say my fuse is short is an understatement, and the nice filter that usually sits between what I think and what I say is nonexistent. I’m hypo, and if I had the energy, kicking the copier would be my top priority.

That’s right, folks, it’s that time again. The Hater and I are eating Low Iodine food in preparation for another radioactive iodine treatment (RAI) next week to treat my thyroid cancer.

The plan is a lab draw Monday morning. Tuesday afternoon I’ll see the doctor, discuss the results, and will probably be told that we’ll have another RAI. I don’t know yet when that will take place, probably Wednesday or Thursday of next week. After the dose, I’ll spend 4 or 5 days in isolation (from The Hater and Zoloft and the rest of humanity) before I can return to the normal world and eat real people food, reinitiate taking my precious Synthroid, and start the slow road back to feeling human again.

Please keep us both in your prayers for the next few weeks. It’s going to get worse before it gets better, and we’ll need all the good vibes that we can get.

When I called home from college, complaining about classes and professors, Dad would always say that PapaLu would say that college is just one big endurance test. Jump through the hoops, keep your mouth shut, and you’ll get through it. ROTC Basic Camp at Ft Knox was as much a mental endurance test as it was physical.

And now, my third trip into what thyroid cancer survivors affectionately refer to as “hypo hell”, I’m struggling to tell myself that this is just another endurance test. The third time’s a charm. If I’ve done it twice already, this should be a breeze.

There’s nothing breezy about it, folks; the golden ring might as well be on Neptune. In other words, it really is true that everything we needed to know we learned in kindergarten: If it looks like poo and smells like poo, you don’t have to taste it to know it’s poo.

I’ll keep you updated as we learn more about the plans for next week. We’re also taking bets to see who has more stamina—- me or the copy machine.

In Other News Unrelated to Feeling Crappy

The mighty Lawrence County Wildcats play Tullahoma tonight and are favored to win. If LCHS wins this game, they will qualify for the playoffs... for the first time in more than 20 years.

It’s a home game, and you can bet a pretty nickel that I’ll be there in spirit. I may even get out my cowbell and ring it in honor of purple and gold football (even if it’s not *the* Cowbell Game). Go Team Go!