What you probably know about this blog is that it documents my experience with Grave’s Disease. What you probably don’t know about this blog is that the idea for it came to me while I was in the bathroom.

A year ago, on sick leave and at my cousin’s house in the suburbs, I was freshly diagnosed and 100% miserable. Kind of like 100% Diesel, but the exact opposite. My cousin was kind enough to let me wallow around in her house for a week and do very little, except sweatily watch movies and drink decaffeinated coffee.

It was on the third day, sometime in between the First Nap Of The Afternoon and Googling the chances of my hair falling out, that I padded into the Torrey household hall bathroom, looked at my hollowed face in the mirror and shouted Eureka!

I would write about this. I would share this story and see if it resonated with anyone else. I would live it, and write it, and it would be the way to make sense of it all. There was something there, something below the sad surface, that knew this was going to be OK. Something that knew, a year later, I’d be back in my cousin’s bathroom, staring into the mirror with full cheeks and a stabilized metabolism. (Who doesn’t dream of such things?)

I was scrolling through old photographs on my phone and arrived to ones taken in June of 2014. It’s my face, but the red rims around the eyes give it away. I see a sick person now, in those photos. I see the watery, staring eyeballs, glazed and huge, and remember what was going on behind them. I doubt a stranger glancing through the pictures would notice the difference. But I do.

Also, I spend a lot of time in my cousin’s bathroom.