As promised, this is my assessment of Month #1 of my third Eighth House Solar Return year. Month #1 ended almost a week ago, all good stuff, but I got walloped in the past week in a true Eighth House kind of way. I’ll go ahead and cover that in Part 2 of this post.
Something I’ve noticed about these Eighth House Sun years–something that’s already becoming evident in the first days of this one: there’s a strong focus on mortality but an even stronger focus on rebirth. They are in many ways “threshold years.” Of course, that doesn’t mean I get everything right, either.
It’s not always so evident if I look merely at birthday to birthday, within the strict confines of 12 months. You can see more of the death and focus-on-death aspects or the death of a relationship or of a way of being. But to see the rebirth and regeneration–for me, at least–it takes looking beyond those 12 months. A solar year has influence beginning three months before your birthday and lasting until three months after the next birthday. The 18-month time span gives a much clearer picture of the Eighth House Solar Year.
Let’s look at specific areas of my life that are highlighted in this solar year, particularly in this first month of the 12-month cycle–although, technically, under the 18-month standard, this is the fourth month that the Eighth House has influenced me.
Health
Health is always a big concern in Eighth House years, whether it’s my health or someone else’s, but usually there’s a more personal concern. My first Eighth House Solar Return’s big health issue started half-way through and resolved in a few months. In my second Eighth House Solar Return, the big health issue was discovered by my doctor in the first month after my birthday, although I had realized two months before that something was wrong…easily within the three-month pre-birthday window. That particular issue healed on its own, though it took around three years for it to resolve 100%.
This year, I’m dealing with another health issue that started on the same time from as the previous one. This year, the big health issue is related to the tweaking of hormone balance after I flatlined my cortisol and several other hormones last year without realizing it. The specialist I saw last fall prescribed a bio-identical cream. I began building up my adrenals with special supplements and within three to four months, I was feeling fantastic again. A little over two months before my birthday, my pharmacy made a mistake with my prescription, effectively doubling the second hormone, which had not been included in the original compound. Uh-oh!
In a little over 14 days, I could no longer remember door combinations or passwords. Not just the fleeting absenteeism of mind but a complete lack of recall that lasted for days. I could not recall the correct word while answering questions from various Colonels in high-viz meetings. I could listen to complicated, detailed briefings and understand fully what was being said, but I could not express my response in an intelligent way. Maybe I truly answered faster and more coherently than I thought, but it seemed to take me hours to form a verbal response. I was out of phase and struggling seriously to make myself understood. I felt like an idiot every time anyone asked me a question.
That week in particularly–between 14 days and 21 days after starting my botched prescription–I found myself driving and forgetting where I was going. Not only that but forgetting where I was. Yes, the road I had travelled at least twice a day for years was suddenly as foreign to me as the other side of the moon. The sudden memory loss terrified me. I began to wonder if I had Early Onset Alzheimer’s. While cleaning out my purse that week, I found the receipt for my prescription, and I was astonished to find that it was not correct. Suddenly, I knew the cause of my memory loss. I went back to my pharmacy and got the current prescription–or so I thought. It still had too much of the second ingredient.
My memory loss improved immediately, but it was still not up to par with where it was prior to the errant prescription and certainly not up to par with where I was a year ago in mental acuity.
After a total of three months of exposure to this second ingredient, I had gained over 15 pounds, felt sluggish and irritated, suffered breathing issues, and a long list of symptoms that I never would have considered to be hormone-related. At a time when I began to contemplate my mortality more because of these symptoms, I began to put it all together and understand what was causing these particular health problems. In the very last week of Month #1 of my Eighth House Solar Year, I ceased the old prescription cold-turkey and started the new one with the correct ingredients a week later. Around five days later, I found that my memory was much less fragmented, sharper than it had been in a long time. I had a tremendous amount of stress going on at work but I was still able to keep up and surpass where I had been over the last few months.
Two days later, the excess ingredient was either completely out of my system or enough out of my system that I could no longer detect any of the symptoms. I woke refreshed, full of energy, feeling like my old self again…or at least my old self four months ago.
So definitely, I experienced a sense of renewal, rejuvenation, rebirth in the first month.
To be continued with a focus on career and relationship changes.
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