Run for my life

I run because I can't stop. Because if I stop I'll never start again.

I know in the past I have banned the word 'tired' from my vocabulary but that has not made the problem disappear.

I am so tired; so tired that I feel I am missing out on the best parts of life.

So I started running-- I run so that some part of my life feels like it is keeping up, like some part seems energetic. How could a person who can run 5 miles possibly be suffering from severe fatigue?

I run so I have a reason to be tired. Instead of just being tired for no known reason.

About three years ago I was so tired I couldn't move. I went to bed at 6 pm and if either of my two children who were 2 and 5 years old at the time needed anything; they had to fend for themselves.

When I got in bed, moving a leg from under the covers was physically impossible.

My doctor diagnosed me with hypo-thyroidism and I have been on synthetic thyroid hormone ever since and will be indefinitely. But I have not reclaimed the old me.

I was always defined as a hyper person-- one who needed to be weighed down with ballast to stay in one spot. Not any more.

I try not to think too much about being tired but sometimes I wonder how it is that I am going to live the rest of my life in this tired state.

Today I read an article in The New Yorker about a woman in a similar predicament—she became an extraordinary slave to her thyroid diagnoses and spent most of her time trying to find a cure for her disease. In the end she realized that she just had to accept that she would always be 80 percent well and live with it –instead of live by it.

I am used to living with chronic health problems – I have lived with one my entire life and I have taken it in my stride and I will live with this too. But some days it gets me down. Sometimes I just want to tell people that I just can't do one---more--- thing---today. In fact, I often do tell my kids; they are pretty used to putting their mother to bed.

So I run to fight back this disease/condition/this whatever-it-is that is slowing me down. I run and when I run I think about how I'll be tired for a reason that night.