Friday, November 09, 2001

Okay, so it’s been months since I posted anything here. They’ve been eventful months, as we all know, and I considered posting something about September 11th, like everyone else on the Web, but eventually concluded I just didn’t have anything that needed saying that other people weren’t saying just as well as I could.

Besides, I was busy. I finished a novel.

For a lot of people writing a novel would be a major event, I suppose. For me it’s not really a big deal anymore. I was surprised to realize awhile back that I’ve lost count of how many novels I’ve written; I went down to the basement and counted, so I’d have an accurate number, but now I’ve forgotten it again.

It’s just my job, you know? It’s what I do.

So I can’t tell you whether this latest was my thirty-second or my thirty-fifth or what, but it was due in June and I finally finished it in October.

There were several reasons for not getting it done on time — my editor died suddenly in March, throwing everything into chaos, and there was the distraction of getting my daughter through high school and off to college, and of course there was September 11, and so on. Mostly, though, I was ill.

Which is what I actually wanted to post about tonight.

I’m still ill. It’s entirely possible I’ll be ill for the rest of my life, which is a peculiar realization to live with.

And I don’t know when it started, which is also a peculiar realization. It sort of snuck up on me over a period of many months, maybe a couple of years. It got worse and worse, and the symptoms got weirder and weirder, until I finally got serious medical attention starting in July. Up until June I honestly wasn’t sure whether I was sick, or was just getting older, or had had a string of separate ailments.

Finally getting an explanation (which took awhile) was amazingly liberating — it wasn’t my imagination, it wasn’t normal, it wasn’t terminal, it wasn’t a zillion separate problems. And there’s some satisfaction in having a rare and obscure disease.

Which I do. I have a pituitary disorder called idiopathic hyperprolactinemia. It’s a relief to have a name for it, to be able to look at the symptoms and say, “Oh, that’s why that’s happening!”

And it’s a relief to be getting treated. At present it’s just palliative measures while my endocrinologist decides whether anything more drastic is called for, but even that has me feeling better than I have in over a year. I’m getting more work done, being less irritable, and generally behaving more like a human being.

And one reason I haven’t posted here since August is that that’s about when the shots kicked in, and I started doing useful stuff instead.

So there’s an explanation of why I haven’t posted — and why I may not post much in the future, either. Ah, well.

posted by Lawrence 9:14 PM

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