Why I Started Writing

  Graves disease.  Seriously.  Two years ago I developed Graves disease in which the thyroid goes into hyper drive.  If our bodies were the Mafia, the thyroid is the Godfather, it controls about everything.  I wasn't enjoying body aches, insomnia, weakness, being hot, weight loss (well, I was enjoying that) but not being hungry all the time (I even had to get up at night to eat), so I had it nuked. I should explain that I sometimes have reactions to medications so rare they don't appear in the side effects list, but to my knowledge no one has reacted to having their thyroid irradiated by writing poetry.  Rhyming poetry.  I hadn't written poetry for a decade and rhyming poetry for a decade before that, but there I was during the busy Christmas season wasting time trying  to find rhyming words for poems I did not want to write.  I wrote 22 poems in 20 days, one of them was about not wanting to write a poem.  Not only did that sentiment turn out to be a poem, but it had that horrible "Purple Cow" cadence.  "I did not want to write a poem, but verse and rhyme possessed me..."
     My specialist had never heard of a reaction like mine and I didn't want to get in a chat room about it because I didn't want to associate with people that strange, so as far as I know, I'm the only one.  Fortunately the poetry waned as the radiation subsided and it is now controllable.  It even became a gift, a way to vent emotions for a sorrow I didn't know was coming.  I knew writing could be a pain in the neck, I just didn't know it could spring from a pain in the neck.