Archive for polycystic ovary syndrome
the chicken or the egg?
I don’t know what to blame more, or what to focus on. I still often wonder is it mainly the blood sugar causing me grief and how much does the thyroid even play into it. I wonder because: today I’m working a 7 hour shift at the model home. I brought tabbouleh for lunch and triscuits and pecans. But after that I was majorly dragging. Just wanted to nap. Then I was starving. I knew this health food wasn’t doin it for me. I need grease, bad. So I went and got a happy meal.
This reminds me of a specific memory. It’s freshman year in high school. The day of a cross-country meet. The coach told us not to eat greasy food because it would make us sluggish. I decided to try a pizza hut pan pizza and see what happened. I ended up shaving 4:55 minutes off my time. Now, I don’t think this would always yield the same results but I just can’t figure it out. Like sometimes I eat mcdonalds fries and get blurry vision and a slow stupid mind. Other times it fuels me for hours and I feel great (like if I do that for my first meal of the day.) There just seems to be no rhyme or reason to how I use food. That tabbouleh was working out great for the last week, until now.
Then there’s another question. The fertility place says that thinner people get PCOS from being high school athletes because that caused them to have too much testosterone. But then they tell us to work out all the time, so I’m confused. Like doesn’t that have to do with why I have the problem in the first place? I also keep drinking iced tea to get some energy during the day. I feel more hypo in general but who knows. None of what’s going on is making sense. It seems like my body craves fat as a fuel, and when I eat super healthy it just backfires.
Still Going
Well I still haven’t made any money recently in real estate so I haven’t been to acupuncture in forever. But I am still doing way better than I was before I ever started acupuncture. My main issue lately has been that I get a second wind late at night and don’t want to go to bed. Then I’m supposed to get up in the morning and I feel dead. The other day I fell back asleep after my alarm went off. Same old song and dance. But luckily I got up in time that no one at work noticed I was late.
I took a waitressing job 2 shifts a week to try to have some money coming in. And this is something I wouldn’t have done when all my symptoms were out of control.
Mainly lately I have been more focused on trying to figure out what to eat for my blood sugar. I’m going to go see a dietician on Tuesday. I’m interested to hear what she will say about wheat. I told my doctor that it seems I have experienced swelling & weight gain since eating wheat again. She said it is just because the gluten-free diet is so restrictive. But I have to disagree the more I think about it. Because it wasn’t as extreme as a no carb diet. I still ate banana bread muffins every morning that I had made with gluten free flour. I ate gluten-free crackers and cookies, pasta. I ate potatoes, rice, potato chips, corn chips (all bad for the blood sugar). And I was super thin. So I think it’s the wheat, not that’s it’s restrictive.
I also got sick of all the side effects of the various birth control pills I had tried to help manage my PCOS/endometriosis. I couldn’t find a happy medium. My dr. kept suggesting the Nuvaring and finally I gave in. Apparently it has the lowest dose of estrogen (and estrogen has had bad side effects for me). Well, I still felt sick like I had turned green or something during that special time of the month. I remembered that she had told me that she had endometriosis and she wore her Nuvaring continuously and just opted out of the periods. So I tried that last month and it worked.
And I just now realized that for once in my life I haven’t really been craving chocolate. Usually I think about it a lot and go to the drug store to buy different kinds. So that’s interesting. But I still feel rather dry & asexual so I don’t know what i will do in the long run. They can’t seem to offer me any explanations or other alternatives which is annoying. You would think that if they know what hormones you’re lacking and what you have too much of, that it could be easily made up for, but I guess not. Even when I was on the progesterone only pill I had some good side effects: (didn’t feel asexual or numb from the waist down. less facial hair) but the bad side effects of horrible cramping and not being able to cool off all day outweighed the good side effects.
blood sugars and hormones and heat – oh my!
I’m sorry I haven’t written in a while. I was in the midst of a job transition. And still am. I’m finally doing real estate full-time. Now when I get home I’m not usually as stressed out so I feel like I have free time and I need to get a life and socialize more. The weather has gotten much warmer and I am already freaked out by it. I’ve worn shorts the last 2 days and to me it’s on the edge of comfortable. I really don’t want it to get any hotter. But I know this is nothing compared to summer. And it’s weird because I used to be so unphased by the heat. In fact, I loved it. I remember laying on a hammock in the summer with a bath towel on top of me, sweating mildly and loving it. But now I can sweat when it’s not even humid out. But today wasn’t hot. It was comfortable. I’ve also realized that mentally I’m in a much better place with acupuncture, but I still need to be careful in terms of realizing that I can get overheated and dehydrated very easily.
I also finally purchased the Pines Wheatgrass Powder at my healthfood store. I like that it mixes in water pretty well. I’m not going to lie and say it tastes like a candybar. I mean it tastes like green. Grassy green stuff. But I’m excited about any product that will help me get more greens in my body. Plus, when I used to see the herbalist, part of her treatment plan for hyperthyroidism was me drinking chlorella, which is a freshwater algae from Japan. It’s supposed to detoxify the body. But this stuff didn’t mix into drinks at all so you had to blend it every time (and clean up the blender) and it was much fouler than the wheatgrass. You pretty much had to blend it with a banana and the milk of your choice just to get it down.
I went to my fertility specialist the other day to get her to let me try a different pill and see if she had any new thoughts on the yeast beast. Of course I’ve been using these tea tree suppositories so that made everything look perfect. So she still doesn’t know for sure if it even is yeast, so that was irritating. But she did ask me if I was diabetic. I said “I don’t think so, no one’s ever told me I was.” Then she asked more questions about my fasting blood sugar. I said “well, it’s always been normal. I first got diagnosed with having low sugar and I do have some high sugars after I eat, but the fasting is always fine.” Then she said that I may want to have a glucose tolerance test because I obviously have a problem and could be diabetic since I hadn’t had that test done.
She pointed out that thousands of people are diabetic and don’t know it. So that really freaked me out. I had figured from the way I felt that my body would go diabetic in maybe 10 years, but she made it out like it would be much sooner than that. I was shocked because I have a blood sugar tester and I didn’t think my numbers were bad enough, often enough to be diabetic. But I can see her point. If they make me drink a ton of sugar on an empty stomach, my sugar could go high enough for me to be called diabetic, because my body can’t control itself. I just didn’t know you could diagnose diabetes that way. I thought it was ONLY if you had a high fasting, meaning that you wake up with it already high. I think it will be a while before this test gets scheduled. Because I don’t have insurance so I will have to have her write a note that I need it. Then I will have to go get an appt with the city health people and see if they will give me permission to get it done. Then I may be waiting for a month to even get it scheduled. So who knows. Unless it’s not very expensive with her people.
Then that very day, I got home and ate a bowl of pasta and meat and ran around the block twice. By the end I could barely lift my legs up and then I felt really dizzy, shakey and like my vision was kind of blurry. So I figure it had something to do with the blood sugar. Maybe I burned through too much sugar too fast? I’m not sure, but it aroused my suspicions even more.
I also talked her into letting me try a progestin-only pill. And I’m not sure if that’s a good idea. She doesn’t think I will like it. But I had read that people with PCOS are lacking progesterone, not estrogen. And I also feel like the combination pill makes me kind of sexually numb from the waist down, to some extent. I also wonder if it has anything to do with me feeling dried out like an old lady and having this nonstop yeast beast. It does say in the package insert that it can cause yeast problems, so I figure may as well take it out of the scenario. But then I read up on progestin only pills and it said they can cause hair growth on the face and acne, 2 of the symptoms of pcos and too much male hormones. So I hope progestin is not derived from a male hormone. I’m pretty nervous about trying it. Even though I was on the shot for 2 years and loved it – even though a few endos told me it was horrible and to get off it asap. Oh well, I’ll keep you posted.
the latest
well, I still can’t seem to get caught up on my bills, even since I’ve started working full-time again. I’ve been toying with the idea of going with a less expensive acupuncturist since my Massage Therapist friend knows of one. I feel bad even thinking that though since I really like my acupuncturist and feel like we have a rapor and I want to be loyal. Plus, she worked at a hospital in China. But money is an ongoing problem with me, so we’ll see. I would at least find out if the same herbal formulas are available at a different place before I would try a new place out.
I still don’t sleep much during the workweek. I am not a morning person, nor do I ever really want to be one. I have to be at work at 7:55 and I usually get there at 7:58 which is already a problem. I’m hoping I can save up money and jump into real estate full-time at some point, but I don’t know how soon that could happen. Things keep coming up. At least with real estate there are no rules about what time you have to get there or anything like that. (Well, at my company there aren’t).
I went running in the woods at that park earlier this week. I figured out which way to go so that I wouldn’t have to really do any uphills. So I did the whole loop and it probably wasn’t too far but I felt proud of myself. But for me running in the woods is way easier than on the roads. I still hope to do a 5k at some point but feel no immediacy about when. Since I felt bad that one week when I ran 2 days in a row, I’m not pushing myself at all. Once a week or so is fine by me. A girl I work with is going to walk a 5k in a month or so and her saying that got me thinking about it more. So who knows. But my muscles have been hurting a lot lately. Not because I did anything. Just because I guess it’s a part of the Graves. My dr. had suspected fibromyalgia at one point because I have Lupus antibodies and I had a high sed rate once. I’ve been sent to rheumatologists twice and they just said it was the Graves that causes those labs. I do think I have some kind of chronic inflammatory issue going on from the Graves and the achiness has been bothering me lately and freaking me out, considering that I’m in my twenties. It makes we worried about what it might feel like when I’m actually old. But I do still have hope that things will come together one way or another. I feel like I have new weapons by looking outside the box.
I also came across an interesting tidbit online yesterday about PCOS. If you go to the wikipedia page on it, at the bottom there was information about a supplement that supposedly treats all of the problems by fixing a missing link in the insulin process. It looks like there are actual published studies on this substance and it really does work, the problem is that it is pretty much impossible to get in the U.S. But I guess there is a similar supplement available. I may try it at some point, because I am getting more and more fed up with the PCOS options that are out there. I always think,”Who has the money to take Metformin and end up in the hospital all the time from the side effects?” Not I said the little red hen, Not I.
I also always feel the weight of that stigma, where they say that people with blood sugar problems/diabetes got it because they gained weight and didn’t take care of themselves. I constantly see this message all over magazines and the media and it makes me mad and I feel the unfairness of my situation. I loved working out and suddenly had to stop from being so weak from the Graves/blood sugar problems that came on at the same time. I hate the diabetes stigma, I think it’s an unfair message to be propogating. Instead, we should talk more about having a food supply that is closer to Canadas. Take out the MSG from our Campbells soup, our chips, our sausage and everything else. Take out the corn syrup, the excessive salt, the preservatives. I think it’s not that people don’t try, it’s that in America our food supply is basically tainted.
Prime example. My mom had a Curves magazine and I was reading it. They were saying not to eat corn syrup – it makes you fat. Well, well, well – and what do we have in Curves cereal which claims to make you thin? …..Corn Syrup!!!!
Extremely Interesting PCOS/Acupuncture study
A Swedish/Italian controlled study from the Biology of Reproduction Journal, (date): involved inducing a state of poly cystic ovaries in rats, with injections of estradiol valerate. Increased activity of the sympathetic nervous system resulted, followed by increased concentrations of nerve growth factor in ovaries, and the adrenal glands. Within 60 days the rats developed polycystic ovariess. The control group received no therapy and maintained features of PCOS. Those treated with acupuncture showed a reduction in the hyperactivity of the ovarian peripheral sympathetic nerve fibers, reduction of the increased nerve growth factor concentrations within the ovaries to normal and reduced the weight of the poly cystic ovaries. This group of doctors then set out with the aim of reproducing similar results in women with PCOS. The study concluded, “We have shown that repeated electroacupuncture treatments restore regular ovulations in the anovulatory women with PCOS. In addition, acupuncture influenced neruoendocrine and endocrine parameters indicative of PCOS, such as LH/FSH ratios, mean testosterone concentrations, and beta-endorphin concentrations, which reduced significantly.”
This study illustrates the hormonal origin of this disease process, and the fact that it can be induced artificially. The induction of this hormonal trauma produces a physiologic state of stress which raises the activity of the sympathetic nervous system, producing a disease syndrome. Acupuncture treatments were effective at resolving this pathologic process because it reduces the level of hypersympathetic nervous system response, relaxing the whole neuroendocrine system.
Source: http://www.easternharmonyclinic.com/medart/marl06.html
Going Eastern in my head
Today I went to her office to get the herbs I had run out of. I do this because I am low on money all the time and I think having to drive all the way up there to see her on another day reinforces the treatment in my mind and maybe on some level it feels like a commitment to getting better.
While there I started talking to a lady in the waiting room. It was her first appointment and she seemed to need encouragement that it would work. She was there for menopausal symptoms and it was making her depressed too. She was trying to get her son to come for anxiety & insomnia but he was skeptical. She was asking me if I saw any difference and I said yes, this has actually given me hope that I can get better whereas when I was faced with the Western M.D.s not wanting to do much I felt like I had no hope – like they just wanted me to suffer. I told her about how I don’t have to take my sleep medicine anymore and how I’m trying to get back into running. How things just seem more clear. I also explained that my problem also involves too much heat in my body and one of the herbs she gave me helps with that. (When I first started going to acupuncture I never had her put the heater on in the room, but now sometimes I do.) The lady wanted to know how long I had been going and how long it would take me to get better. I didn’t even bring up my reproductive issues but said I think it may take me a while because I see it as her peeling back all the layers. It made me feel good to give someone else encouragement. When you think about it, there’s really not a lot that Western medicine can do for menopause. Hormones, with estrogen being linked to breast cancer. Lube. And that’s about it – it seems.
I think either my hormones are a hot mess or the Graves is just heating up and drying out my whole system. I talked to my gyno on the phone and she thinks my yeast issues are drying me out. Which could be true. I’m just afraid it’s the PCOS itself. The hormonal problems. Or I thought it might be the pill throwing me off since I never had this problem before I was on the pill. She doesn’t think the pill would cause that. But she is gung ho for people taking all manner of hormones. She said if the yeast is completely gone and the dryness persists then I can always do Nuva Ring. I guess it dampens everything. My problem with this is that I don’t like having to rely on something like that for a problem that I shouldn’t be having until I’m 50! This is just crazy to me. I am obsessed with getting to the root of the problem, not just trying to smooth over them the way Western medicine does. Maybe I have gone completely eastern or holistic in my head. I’m not sure. But it’s hard to relate to the way these thing are thought of.
In other news I am still waiting on the CAT scan for the kidney stones. I am on a city health plan so I am having to wait a long time. I hope it happens soon.
I went to the company christmas dinner tonight and I felt like I was being made fun of for not drinking. I have a sensitive stomach and don’t like alcohol with food. And the dr. told me no bubbly drinks with kidney stones and wine would have me too tipsy. They were also laughing that I was actually eating the blooming onion. ( I don’t eat a lot of fast food). Then at some point someone was asking me about my dip for my catfish and I was saying a little goes a long way and I didn’t want to go overboard with it. Then my boss said “Do you ever go overboard? You seem really conservative to me” which I took as a huge insult. I guess I just hate that people act like I’m a prude about food without knowing why I eat the way I do. And at the job they’re always yelling at me for one thing or another and I feel on edge so I never really let loose. The whole thing just annoyed me. I know that place is bogging me down, spiritually. I feel like I can’t be myself there.
that acupuncturist knows what she’s doing
The pain on my lower left side of my back went away so I don’t know if it was stone or not. Meanwhile the battle of the neverending yeast infection rages on. I just started taking acidophilus to see if that would help. I really hope I won’t be battling this the rest of my life. It’s insane. And I also realized it’s either my hormones are off or one of my meds but I am dryer than the grand canyon down there and I’m way too young for that. I really want to figure out what is causing that. I’m now on the pill so I don’t know how that factors in. But I do know I never had this problem before I was on the pill or when I was on the shot (which is just progesterone I guess). I also have done some reading recently that suggests that people with PCOS aren’t producing progesterone like they should, but have enough estrogen. I don’t know if too much estrogen would be a bad thing down there. I also had a dr. tell me once that it might be my beta blocker, but this started before I was on that. I just hope to God it’s not some correlation to me not being on Glucophage (aka insulin regulating med that ties you to the toilet 24/7 + sends you to the hospital with dehydration)
I have been pretty tired/lazy this week. I still have the bad habit of not going to bed early when I’m extra tired. Last night I was starting to go back to how I used to be. I was exhausted around 6-7 pm then got through that, drank a cup of white tea and was majorly hyped up, not wanting to go to bed. I felt like my whole body was buzzing all over again just like before. I had started thinking that I had been doing better on the original herb the acupuncturist gave me which she said was for excess heat and thirst in the body. Funnily enough I ran out of the current herb I was taking and went back to her office to get more. I didn’t mention that I thought the first herb had been better. She just out and gave me that one along with another one. It was like she subconsciously knew somehow, or maybe from observing me. My face got it’s red splotchy look on it today to go along with how I was feeling. Edgy, weak, my blood sugar went low at work and made everything look like I was in a parallel universe etc. I couldn’t go to lunch because the other lady had already gone and I had to stay put. I’m pretty sure that in chinese medicine a red spread over the cheeks is a sign of fire in the body. So I’m wondering if she knew just from that. I am fascinated either way though.
what drove me to try acupuncture
I have decided to embark into the mystical world of acupuncture. I almost feel like I was led in this direction. it started because I was forced to follow up with the drs that monitor my polycystic ovary issue which in turn causes my low blood sugar. once again their only recommendation was to go back on this diabetes medication that is supposed to balance out your hormones which in turn is supposed to balance out your insulin etc. but then of course they once again said “but you can’t really eat carbs with this unless you want to have stomach problems” which translates to being chained to a toilet all day. I used to take basically the same medication and I think it had much to do with my constant stomach upset, and not only that – it doesn’t make you actually FEEL any better.
So this irritated me to high heaven. I tried to explain to them that I have some weird form of Graves disease and I’m constantly hungry and not eating carbs is a starvation diet for me. But I got the vibe that they thought I was one of those noncompliant people. The more I thought about it the more upset I got about my experiences with Western medicine. for the last 4 years I have thrown most of my income away on drs visits. Some of their medications have made great improvements in my life (beta blockers). But because I have Graves showing in my eyes but by labs are not outside the normal range I cannot truly get treatment. They enjoy throwing a drug at me for each seperate symptom, which naturally starts to add up when you have something like Graves that has about 20 symptoms. And it also adds up on your pocket book. So I thought “I’m sick of playing these games and jumping through hoops all for nothing.” They had also said that some of my symptoms sounded like endometriosis – which I had heard acupuncture might help so I was starting to get curious about it.
I called up a Chinese acupuncturist when she asked if I wanted an appointment her bright subdued voice won me over.
My first session was: Monday, October 29th, 2007
Before it was my turn I could hear the guy in the next room making all these noises and I thought “geez, he’s being noisy.” But then when it was my time to get stuck I did the same thing. You get nervous right before each stick so I would laugh each time. So she left me to lay like that. I started feeling nauseous just thinking of all the needles in me, so I had to pretend there weren’t any. Then when she took them out I felt really tingly in certain places. Like Icy Hot. I felt pretty happy, content, and calm afterwards. For once I could just drive with no music on and not fidget with the radio. I remember thinking that my head felt different and that I felt more like my old self. More goofy. So far afterwards I feel like I can tell a difference. She gave me this chinese medicine to take to cool me down and I still get hot sometimes but I keep thinking I feel cool like a cucumber other times. I also feel like I can let things roll off my back a little easier, although today I can tell it’s starting to wear off a bit. But my hands shake so I’m constantly knocking glasses of water over so today I knocked one over of course and it pissed me off, but it wasn’t the same level of pissed by any means. No expletives were screamed. I also felt like I had more clarity. I was more in tune. She said in the beginning I will have to do it often so as not to lose the results we have gained, so as much as I am dying to quit my job I will have to tough it out til I find another.
An intense moment of clarity came at work. In the morning there were 4 notes waiting for me about things I had done wrong. E.G. “no more drinks at your desk” because of course my shaking hand knocked one over and got water in the calculator. So here I am, papers spread out all over my desk with these notes just glaring at me. And I just had the strongest feeling, that voice in my head saying “walk out now. You get your ass up and you walk out. This is so wrong for you. This is so against everything you are. You are abstract, this job is technical and mathmatical. The people are mean and unhelpful.” you catch my drift. So I didn’t walk out because I was thinking that I have to pay my bills and pay for acupuncture. But I felt like everything was so clear as if my inner voice was back.
I dunno, the physical things still abound, like my heart still pounds when I go up a few steps. I’ve felt nauseous a few times. My legs shake when I walk up the stairs. I probably can’t go running, but since I’ve felt results I’m very curious to see how far I can go with it.
