Over a Year in Public

I can’t believe it’s been more than a year since I wrote things down. I didn’t even journal on paper during the last year.

Maybe I should catch readers up. I wonder if I still have readers left after being gone for so long. I am on Facebook and I have connected with some of you.

I can’t really remember last December except I do know that’s when we started really looking at places to move. We had already settled on Florida but I don’t think we knew an exact area.

We signed our lease in February.

In May I saw a new gynecologist and she agreed to perform my hysterectomy.

By June 1st we were both here in sunny Florida, ready to start living our best lives. This was something I thought Liam was doing in NH but I don’t think he was, and I know I wasn’t. I hated it there. I made a few really great friends and I’ll visit but I did not like living there.

Florida has changed a lot for me. How I look at life, my faith, my confidence, my outlook on how I am doing physically.

The hysterectomy in September helped a lot too. The only downside is that I’ve been thrown into early onset menopause (or surgically induced menopause). I guess technically I was already in menopause due to a 5 year lack of cycle, but the surgery took my ovaries and everything and that really sealed the deal.

The extreme lose of hormones, even for someone who had low levels to begin with, has been challenging. I’m going gray (though I did dye my hair today) and my moods are all over the place, and the hot flashes…my God, the hot flashes.

But overall I think the surgery did what I wanted it to. I’m slowly losing weight (and keeping it off), my anxiety, which used to be crippling on a weekly basis, has become significantly more manageable, and I’m feeling healthier overall.

I love living in Florida, the summer was hot but not as unbearable as I thought it would be. And the fall/early winter has been stunning. Such a small amount of rain and the temps are still into the 80’s some days.

Liam and I, in general, are doing so much better here. It’s crazy hormone days, or just days when I really let things frustrate me more than they should, that I feel the need to sequester myself. Yesterday was hard, emotionally, and today is not much better. I wish I could just go get a hotel room for the night, run away for an evening. I’m not good at confrontation and if I’m not good then Liam is horrible, he just shuts down.