Human Rights Make Me Sick!!

This is a holiday weekend--December 10th is International Human Rights Day. Awesome! you might say, before you realize the full implications of celebrating human rights in a country that the IMF actually had to cut funding from due to a lack of the above.

Who cares, right? It's a DAY OFF!! It's also my friend Steve's one-year anniversary with his Cambodian wife. This is significant in my life only because his wedding is where I contracted the bronchial virus that then knocked out my thyroid.

That's right, I've been sick for a year officially, this weekend. Can you even imagine? How crazy is that? At least I'm not bedridden anymore.

In Case You Never Hear from Me Again...

I may not be able to blog for the next few weeks...out of nowhere, my super-sleepy hypothyroid symptoms came back. That's the thing about thyroid problems; the symptoms fade away for a time, then come back full force. Just when you think something is gone for good, you get slammed again. In my case, I suddenly started feeling super-sleepy again, right there in the middle of class, this past Friday.

This isn't your average sleepiness...this is like trying to fight off a coma. It takes over my mind and soul, and I can't focus. I feel lightheaded and become unable to form a coherent sentence. I literally cannot function. This is advanced sleepiness. And it might ruin my next few months.

Anyway, if I start to disappear for weeks on end again, that's why.

Homesickness

I have a confession to make: I haven't posted in awhile because...well...I've been homesick.

I don't get it...I've now been travelling the world for a year and a half, gone through three jobs in that time, done battle with corporate China, and overcome a long and debilitating bout of thyroid disease. I have managed to do all this totally alone. And not once during these struggles have I ever thought about going home. Not once. Nor have I ever longed for my home country, it's bleak employment scene, or the broken family I left behind.

At first I thought I was experiencing some sort of delayed culture shock: ten months in, everything about Cambodia is annoying me. Motodops, workplace hierarchies, students, bosses, groceries, rich people, poor people, security guards, corruption, cars parked in stupid places, even that stinky rat that's been decaying on the sidewalk down the road from me for the last nine days. Everything and everyone has been rubbing me the wrong way.

In short, the magical paint with which my mind gilded Cambodia has been knocked off. But does culture shock happen after you've lived in a country for nearly a year? Someone recommended "expatriate burnout", and maybe that's my problem. Or maybe it's just my imperfectly-healed thyroid again, who knows?

The bottom line is, it's made me long for my home in the Ohio River valley, half a world away. I miss wide open spaces and egalitarianism. I miss people actually being able to conceive of the fact that I'm not rich. I miss the feeling of not being a hulking giant. I miss being involved in anti-climate change action, and I miss talking to other native speakers of English, in English.

While Phnom Penh can offer a great quality of life for a relatively low cost, it is not my home, and will never be my home. I'm really feeling that reality right now. And for some reason, that has rendered me unable to write blog entries.

Maybe I need to get out of town for a few days...

Liver 'N Onions. With Hair!

There's something on my mind that's really been bothering me lately. More precisely, there's something on my head that's really been bothering me; or rather, there's something NOT on my head.

Namely, this is hair.

Under normal circumstances, I have literally enough hair on my head for at least two other people; as if to mock this fact, it generally floats in a large, uncontrollable, puffy halo around my face. However, I am no longer living under normal circumstances.

I am living under the tyranny of an out-of-control thyroid. And one of the (many) things that out-of-control thyroids do to you is make you lose hair.

Clumps of it are lying on the ground, sitting on my keyboard, floating in the breeze. When I wash what remains of it, it clogs the drain. When I touch it, it comes out between my fingers; and when I cook, it gets into my food.

I hate when it gets into my food the most. I have to spend a lot of time searching for hairs and pulling them out of the way, and it's not fun to exercise that restraint when you are unbearably hungry all the time.

• French toast. With hair!
  
• Ginger-chicken and rice! WITH HAIR!!
• Liver 'n' onions...with HAIR.
  

My fast food needs no condiments; my ice cream needs no toppings.

Hair is an eco-friendly, recyclable, high-protein food source. I am the future.

The only problem is that there's not a lot of it left on my head. So I'm just going to have to pretend I'm really, really fond of hats.

Bad Thyroid! Heal!

If I have learned one thing during my time here, it is: Don't ever get a thyroid infection.

I think I am recovering from one right now, and it sucks. SUCKS.

Sometime in early- to mid-January, my body suddenly started destroying itself. You can read the very long version of what happened to me right here (and it still doesn't really explain everything I went through), but I don't want to repeat it all here. It's grim.

The illness was really, really acute for about the first 4-6 weeks (it's the "near-death" crisis that led me to create this blog). After that, it slowly started getting better, but suffice to say, it's still causing me some grief.

This is your thyroid:

When it's attacked by antibodies or a virus, it starts freaking out, shedding all of it's special "T4" thyroid hormones, which looks approximately like this:

Too much T4 shed into your bloodstream will intoxicate you. It puts you into a hypermetabolic state, turning you into an insane maniac that will eat everything in his/her path. You are also constantly freaked out and convinced that you are going to die.

Recovery has been a long, slow battle to be fought day-to-day, hour-to-hour, breath-to-breath. Hope and pray that you never have to know what hyperthyroidism feels like!

This week, I have been feeling okay (sort of. Except for the bone-weariness, sensitivity to temperatures, and the need to eat entire pizzas four times a day). Next week, who knows? I may feel 100%...or I may descend back to the depths of hell...it's carrying on waaaay longer than the internet says it's supposed to.

I shouldn't rely on the internet to solve my problems, but...the medical establishment denies that I even have a problem. They tell me it's "just stress" or a "bid for attention", or worse, that I am a drug addict. That would be funny if it weren't such an insulting falsehood.

So this is where the start of this blog finds me: trying to get better, and hoping I have nothing worse than a temporary inflammation of the thyroid (although if this is the case, I get to go HYPOthyroid next!).

No, it has nothing to do with Phnom Penh, but if I randomly die, this is probably the reason!