Since having Hannah, I have a low functioning thyroid. I’m on synthroid, and the doctor claims this will make me all right. And when I get my levels tested, and my levels are good, so she tells me I’m all right.

But this does not stop me from suffering weird things, which, when I finally think to google them, always turn out to be related to a low functioning thyroid.

That is, my toes are frequently numb. I have god-awful tailbone pain when I’m premenstrual. And my neck and shoulders get so, SO, SO tense like I can’t even describe. For a while there, every single night I was asking Ian for a backrub when I got into bed. And it’s not because I’m a big sucka for backrubs (though I totally am) but that my shoulders were one big massive lump of tight muscle and I wouldn’t get to sleep for hours if I didn’t take ibuprofen every night and get a back rub.

But anyhow, pushups. Pushups are the answer to the shoulder thing. I do not know why, but I noticed it this summer when I was home with Hannah and I was trying to do more calisthenics to build up muscle to speed up my metabolism to not be gaining so much weight from my low thyroid. If I was doing pushups every couple of days, my shoulders weren’t in horrible knots all the time. And then I kinda stopped doing them ’cause I went back to work. And I was getting backrubs all the time again. And Ian had memorized the map of knots that were in my back and began to predict my knots with disturbing accuracy (“Oh, I found that one on the right shoulder that usually means you also have a corresponding one in this other place. Yep, there it is.”)

But when we started doing the hundred pushups program, then my back started feeling better. I didn’t really notice until this week. Because we do our pushups on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Then not on the weekend. So we never go more than two days off. But this week I did my pushups on Friday, and then on Monday I was frenziedly writing and forgot about pushups. And I really felt it all day today. At the end of the day i was pleading for a backrub – which I haven’t done in weeks.

So. Interesting, that. Cause I’ve been saying to myself how at some point I’ll be done this program and I can stop with these infernal pushups. But I’m kinda suspecting I can’t.

I can probably at some point just do maintenance pushups. We’ll see.