The nurse on the phone: “You’re a complicated case.” She wasn’t even sure which doctor to refer me to, and I said I’d wondered the same thing so I’d decided to throw it all in the lap of my primary care and let her decide.

The upshot is that we already know I have the autoantibodies for both hyper- and hypo- thyroidism and that they usually cancel each other out but since the hyper- speeds up the heart, let’s test that first. So I drove over to the lab.

Okay, not that. Next!

The phone rang after I looked up my results: they’ll call back and let me know what the next step is. But if I have a night like Friday again, go to the ER, okay?

Yes’m. I told her that 30+ years of lupus had left me a little too blasé about such stuff and I apologized for that.

Meantime, for those who didn’t hear, there was a surprise at the Newport Folk Festival on Sunday: Joni Mitchell, who  had polio as a kid and a brain aneurysm awhile ago and hasn’t done a set on stage in twenty years, showed up and sang with Brandi Carlisle.

Who cried a little for sheer joy and love and I think so did everybody else, including me. Go Joni.