THAT MORNING

Jury duty! Bike to the Hall of Justice. Turns out the case is a violent felony--rape and abduction at knifepoint. If it happened! Black/white couple, he said/she said accusations, and lots of questions on the jury-selection preliminary questionnaire probing whether jurors are sexist or racist.

Some questions force me to reveal I was battered. Others force me to reveal my autism, too. In daily life I try hard not to dredge up old trauma, and to pass as human. But I'm under oath to tell the truth, even if both confessions are torture for me.

Home around noon. Punchy, exhausted, reek of fear. Too tired to cook more than rice noodles with a lot of vegs & tofu.

THAT AFTERNOON

"Worst Pills, Best Pills" (a newsletter from Public Citizen, Ralph Nader's nonprofit) warns that thyroxine gets over-prescribed. Last month, the doctor upped my dose sharply--from 112 to 137 micrograms, without telling me--I learned only when I tried to renew the prescription & found it boosted. The result? Over the last three weeks I've gotten all the symptoms of hyperthyroidism--shortened sleep, weight loss, hot flashes, tachycardia, night sweats, dehydration, increased emotional lability. Historically I haven't been too sensitive to dosage--anything from 50 to 100 blocked my symptoms. But 112 already felt high, and it looks like I've passed my upper limit at last. I've slept so poorly, felt so edgy... is my stress really part poisoning?

THAT EVENING

I get a phone call saying "you're excused from jury duty."

THAT NIGHT

I go into a dentist's office on a street corner. Try over and over to schedule a dental appointment to fix some work they botched. But the receptionist will do anything but! She tries to bill me for more work they did wrong, then for work they didn't even do. I want my tooth fixed!

My dental records or bills are on a wooden shelf board--not sitting on it, printed on the wood! I carry the board around. Awkward! As I argue with the receptionist, it feels heavier and heavier...

I find another woman in the office and talk with her instead. She's looking at a large medieval-looking woodcut print of several figures in sepia, doing... what? They bulge in low relief--definitely a hand press. I ask if it's her work, admiringly. Flirting? Show a pencil sketch I'm working on of a dream. For inept me, it's flirting...

A big white guy comes along and snatches my sketch out of my hands. Laughing nastily, he calls me "Nigger!" (the slur is always capitalized here). He repeats it, and suddenly the first receptionist's weird behavior comes into focus--not incompetence or eccentricity or personal dislike of me, but racism. I didn't know I was a Nigger! Because in THIS alternate world, races are based on shape or scent or body language--not skin color. She's the majority race, and I'm a Nigger--one who apparently can't pass.

That means I've given this guy the perfect excuse to attack me--he caught me interracially flirting. Miscegenation, polluting their gene pool!

Oh, I defend myself as best I can--he's so big he's slow. He swings, I dodge. But he's huge, and starts beating me brutally. He kicks my ribs and I feel some snap loose. As he pulls out a razor...

...I wake. Sweating, feverish, heart racing.

NOTES IN THE MORNING

• Receptionist tries to bill me for nothing: from the story "With a Finger in my I" by David Gerrold, in Again, Dangerous Visions which I just reread after years.
• The N-word: answering jury-duty questions raised intense racial fears--unusual ones. I'm autistic in a system built for neurotypicals. I try hard to pass, but I really do see autistics and normals (and sociopaths like the nightmare guy) as races, ones way more different than the trivial social constructs you call races. I live in another sensory and mental world, and I get shunned, spat on, beaten up. Doctors mistreat me, cops suspect me, security guards follow me. Smells like race to me.
• Threat with a blade, violence ripping cartilage: old but real traumas revived by that questionnaire.
• I asked about thyroxine; I got answered! My sleep dropped from 8 hours to 4 and my dreams turned to nightmares before any stress from jury duty. Overdose!
• ACTION: Trust your body, not your doctors. Cut back--literally. Half-pills for a week or two (thyroxine's slow to clear out) then two-thirds and see how that works.

A MONTH LATER

I got referred to an endocrinologist. Just like the receptionist in my nightmare, she was contemptuously dismissive. "Your symptoms are subjective!" Ignored my actual thyroid level, the highest it's ever been. Insisted I stick to a high dose.

So I went home and kept cutting my pills. Overdose symptoms ebbed; now I get nearly eight hours' sleep. No more nightmares. I'm healthy... as long as I cut the dosage myself. Since my doctors won't.

After the opioid disaster, I thought doctors learned to be wary of over-prescribing powerful meds. Nope! They concluded opiates alone are hazardous--when the real hazard's not pills, but professionals who ignore patients who report trouble. Since we, the Great Unwashed, are just N...

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