Sort Of Like How The Name "Ethel" Is Getting Popular Again
Volume II, Issue II - Nov. 2011

For the first years of the internet, if you keyed in my name into any of the primitive search engines, the first result would be something I'd written on a women's message board with a focus on endocrinology. Having just been diagnosed with hypothyroidism, and using my real name, I confess in my post to the board members, overwhelmingly middle-aged and overweight, that I had just gained 20 pounds, suffered from depression, and lacked energy to do anything about it.

For the better part of a decade, then, anyone who dialed-up their computers and wished to catch up on my life would read my pity party post on the "Madonna-Whormones" website.

***

My best guess is that my thyroid died in Spring 1997. I was living in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, registering film students by day and running around and singing karaoke by night, unfocused, euphoric, drinking cheap beer. I was another twentysomething male poet with an MFA trying to make it downtown.

Then, after the winter broke, after I moved in with my girlfriend, I went inside to get out of the heat and stayed there. I bought a recliner chair. I quit my job. I ordered Chinese food. Left to my own design, I would watch procedural dramas days, weeks, at a time, and stop only occasionally to wonder why this was how I spent my days. I gained 20 pounds in short order. I dragged myself to my primary doctor to tell him about the fatigue, how I could fall asleep in his office right then, no problem at all. He raised his arms and grabbed my throat. It was like a slow-motion karate move, and I was too slow to respond. He tilted my head up with one thumb, and as I stared toward the fluorescent lights on the ceiling, he squeezed and stroked my throat, like in an animal rights video I saw of foi gras farmers force-feeding ducks.

"Your neck is huge," he said. "Haven't you noticed?"

I guess I had. I traced a finger around my neck and looked at the face mirror on the counter. What does a fat neck have to do with anything?

"It's your thyroid," my doctor said. It was the medical explanation I was in search of, and yet it was not what I wanted to hear. Hearing it meant I had to face my body as some sort of enemy working against me. I have always thought of my body as an unnecessary burden, the thing that would take me to record stores or libraries and then, hopefully, leave me alone. Hearing about my thyroid meant I had to regard my body as part of a whole; it had become another body to be researched, a subject inquired.

***

The thyroid belongs to the body, a philosopher once wrote, not the mind. The first response I had when I read this: No shit, Sherlock. The second was to scold myself for again misunderstanding the mind-body problem.

Up until the 19th century, the mass near rear third cartilage in its glottis in front of the larynx was considered a useless organ. If the thyroid was removed, doctors would observe patients turn into cretins with coarse hair, bloated stomachs and thick skin.

When sopranos complained how they grew tired from holding notes, doctors wielded laryngoscopes and observed their weakened glotti.

An old theory of why thyroids go kaput is a blast of cold air; maybe this explains why every opera singer Ive ever met wears scarves well into late spring.

***

When any part of the body stops working, other cells attack and barnacle onto it like a foreign object. It grows. In my case, I had something the size of a golf ball in the front of the lower part of my throat. For weeks after that doctor visit, I'd reenact his examination. I'd walk down Madison Avenue, stroking my throat with one or both of my hands. I looked as if I was strangling myself or committing some act of ambulatory autoeroticism.

I started doing shoulder stands in my apartment because a new age doctor with a funny gray beard advised it on a website. It increases circulation to the thyroid; I don't know why increasing circulation to a dead part of your body would be a good thing, but it kept me from strangling myself in public.

And so I kept doing it.

***

In 1936, a scholar sought to find an explanation for the "magico-religious connection" between Juno—daughter of Saturn, goddess of marriage, of youthfulness and fertility—and women's full eyebrows. His best guess came from a gynecologist friend, from whom he learns that a woman's inability or disinterest in sexual function may be the result of a defect in the thyroid, specifically an underactive thyroid, or hypothyroidism. The "shock of childbirth" might cause thyroid underactivity, another scholar says; the exact mechanism remains unknown. A primary presenting symptom of hypothyroidism is a falling out of eyebrow hairs. This might explain how, in ancient Rome, a woman's full eyebrows were thought to be a sign of goddesses' blessings.

I think of my wife's full brown eyebrows, which she plucks and waxes.

I think of Wordsworth's phrase for sexiness: "Junonian hospitalities."

***

Philosophers' mentions of thyroids in mind-body discussions lean toward a caricature, as if this gland held the answer to all autonomous actions of the body, every instinctual movement. It's like when I would overhear discussions on consciousness at the philosophy department where I was a secretary. One professor insisted on using the "philosophical zombie" scenario for every lecture. Someone would fly in from Michigan to lecture on how we measure beauty in works of art, and this guy would be the first to speak about a "behavioral zombie" that would be able to look at a painting but not fully appreciate or measure its beauty.

He was really thinking about conscious consciousness and hardwired consciousness, or things that are happening to help consciousness but not done consciously, if that makes any sense. Another philosophy professor writes how, as embryos, we live through our "furry if unfeathered condition" until the spleen, duodenum and thyroid are formed, and consciousness begins thereafter.

If the thyroid dies, a certain kind of consciousness dies along with it. A part of the body goes to sleep and never wakes up.

***

In a way, I was happy to find out I had hypothyroidism because I thought taking this new medication called Synthroid (levothyroxine sodium tablets, USP) would make me skinny again or at least my own approximation of skinny. I assume the medication helped and continues to help, since I will take this medication for the rest of my life. But it did not make me skinny; instead, it placed me in a zombie life, with objects suspended in a fog, level to my ears. These objects—conversations, weather, musical notes, the horizon— remained still or buzzed around me, expecting a reaction. The man-made substitution for what was once in my body loses its mojo at some part of the day. I could still fall asleep wherever I sit.

To complement my therapy, I have ingested lyophilized glands, porcine supplements, iodine, enzymes, yerba mate teas. I have dropped tinctures of wild yam, dandelion, cayenne, ginger into double-filtered water.

If I am idle I think of my thyroid; if I am frisky I think of my thyroid.

***

Ernest Hemingway's nephew committed suicide in high school and was attributed to a low thyroid condition. Michael S. Reynolds put all these pieces together in a way that makes me forget my own depression, not so much brought on by a dead thyroid but certainly made worse.

There is not a large body of thyroid literature. You could look to mentions of eyebrows or necks, but specific mentions of the thyroid are rare. One notable exception is Lydia Davis, who has a piece called "The Thyroid Diaries," published in 1998. In it, her narrator talks about having a "cloudy mind." She forgets things, and feels as if she's in a different house or different town. Davis's story's point is that people whine too much about their medical problems. The narrator talks about her brain working well enough but maybe more slowly than usual, and also about going slowly and doing good work, or going quickly and doing bad work or going even more slowly and doing just good enough work.

It's by far not my favorite story by Davis; it's longer than most Davis stories and it tries to have a plot or at least characters. The gears show too much, the same way thyroids stick out. The story ran in the New Yorker, which both surprises me and doesn't. It's set in a middle class milieu. It has a deadpan tone. It might make readers think of mid-period Steve Martin. I loved him so much for his first albums—it's cliché to say this, but it's true—because he avoided the setting for his jokes. Whenever the setting or context came in—his novels, his awful movies—is when the middle class people started to love him.

***

A Rich Poet, writing an appreciation of a recently dead poet-teacher, writes how he knew "how not to overdo the streetsmarts," how it could get showy or tawdry. That pissed me off when I read it, the same way the Lydia Davis story pissed me off, but they both made sense in a kind of dead thyroid way.

A Famous Poet, right at the time of my diagnosis, bullied me in a succession of emails after I had to turn down a sestina she wrote because it had 20 lines. I solicited her for work, and when I opened the file, I did a double-take. It looked so short. When I told her that her sestina had only 20 lines, she said she was a postmodernist and such rules don't apply to her. I thought about all the postmodern sestinas with the correct 39 lines but held my tongue. When I said I couldn't get it past the other editors, she insisted the real reason was because lesbians and anti-war sentiments appear in it. But really it was the 20-line thing.

"Do you know who I am?" she wrote. "I'm [First Name] Fucking [Last Name]!"

I tried to calm her down, but you can't do that in a thyroid fog. I thought back to the five years I worked at a car wash, how doctors knocked on windows from the inside of their cars to point out a spots the brushes missed. I could hear the faint knocks, like sailors inside a sinking ship, under the roar of the huge blowers throwing drops off the car. The emails from the Famous Poet came and went, like a meaningless organ.

My dead thyroid marks my entrance into the detached bourgeoisie.

***

In 1997, around the time of my own diagnosis, Oprah Winfrey dedicated a show to hypothyroidism, with a special focus on weight gain in women. This was right around the time people stuck long needles and aspirated the nodules in my throat. The golf ball is gone now.

Ten years later, I visit an endocrinology practice that takes up two floors in a very large medical office building. I call it ThyroidLand. I am shuttled from sonogram to blood work station to physician assistants to medical doctors. In each room there is a plastic model of the thyroid for handy demonstration.

A part of my body went to sleep and never woke up. Parts of my memory didn't just slow down: they floated away.

I write these sentences at 1:33am in the middle of a dark and cold February night. I had trouble sleeping. I knew that it was true, even if it was the thyroid-less zombie version of me speaking. At this point I cannot distinguish my condition from the natural effects of aging. There's a big difference between 40 and 30 years old. I wanted, and still want, to take a pill that makes me skinny and young again and I don't want to work hard for it. I don't want to fall asleep standing up. I think about this when my head is upside down on my shoulders or an exercise ball, as blood rushes to the dead part of my neck.

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