More Questions Than Answers…

I’m a pretty private person – a fact that may seem a little contradictory to the personal nature of this blog. However, despite the inherently public aspect of keeping an online journal, the truth is, I’m not usually one to bear my soul to the world. Let’s face it, even though I’m lucky enough to have several people who read these ramblings regularly and who then, in turn, leave bits of themselves here for me to ponder, all of this is still fairly anonymous. I get to choose how much I share and when or even *if* I share it at all. Yes, this is a public forum, but the amount I expose is entirely up to me, which makes the sharing pretty safe, and therefor something that I’ve been able to reconcile with my own very real need for privacy.

I guess that’s why the last few weeks have been tough for me. Physically and emotionally there’s been a lot going on with me… stuff that’s harder for me to talk about than what I ate yesterday, how many miles I walked (or didn’t walk) tonight or how tightly my jeans are fitting this week. I’ve been telling myself that I need to share this stuff. That keeping it all bottled inside isn’t healthy and that I can only benefit from the wisdom of those people who stumble across my words, but it’s been hard for me to turn that knowledge into action.

As much as I hate to admit it, part of my hesitation has to do with the personal nature of what’s wrong with me. Seriously, it pains me to think that I am *that* much of a prude, but really, it’s hard for me to reveal all the intimate details of my recent gynecological failings to the world. Not only does talking about that stuff make *me* uncomfortable, but I can only imagine how *you* must feel. I keep having visions of people squirming in their chairs and not being able to move onto the next blog in their readers fast enough.

*sigh*

But, you know, the truth is that all of this is embarrassing for another reason. The fact is that the things that are happening to me now are my own fault. I’m not the victim of a bad gene pool (at least not in this case, anyway) and I’m not a statistical anomaly. All the health problems that are plaguing me now are the result of years of neglect on my part. I’ve spent a very long time not listening to my body, and now I am paying the price.

About 15 or 16 years ago I stopped having regular periods. I’ve never been one to keep super good records when it comes to those things, and I wasn’t on birth control at the time, so it was several months before I thought, “hmmm… shouldn’t I be having one of those?” I was in college at the time and didn’t have health insurance, so I just went to the a nearby free clinic. I don’t remember the doctor who saw me, but I remember her pushing me through with little patience. After a quick exam, she basically said that I was obese and that as a result of my own slovenliness, (my words not hers), my periods had stopped. She suggested that I take some pills which would induce my period and that I then start taking birth control to regulate it. She gave me no additional information, and this was long before the days of readily available access to medical information via the internet, so I complied and my periods started again.

I stayed on the pill for a couple of years after that, but then, over time I stopped taking them and eventually my periods became less and less frequent until I averaged only 1 or 2 a year. This went on for years and, like so many other things related to my health, I ignored it.

At this point I wish I could say that it was a fundamental shift in my pattern of behavior that caused me to finally wise up and seek medical attention for this, but the truth is that the only reason I eventually decided that I might need to see a doctor is because, in addition to not having regular periods for, oh… a decade, over the last 2 years or so I’ve also noticed a steady thinning of my hair. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not bald or anything, and in fact my husband assures me that he has noticed no difference in the thickness of my hair at all, (it’s always been pretty thin), but despite his claims to the contrary, I know that it is definitely thinning. I still have the same thin, straight hair that I’ve always had, it’s just that now I have significantly less of it. And even though my husband might not see a difference, I definitely do. And I’m not imagining it.

And so, in short, vanity led me to see a doctor about a problem that I should have addressed long ago. And here’s the thing, as I’ve said here before, I’m not an idiot. I have two degrees, I can finish the New York Times crossword puzzle, I can feed myself and tie my shoes and, in most situations, function in society without the need of assistive technologies… and yet, when it comes to my own health and to taking care of myself properly, apparently, I am a complete moron.

At first, as you know, my doctor thought it was PCOS. So… she strapped me to the table and did an internal ultrasound and discovered precisely nothing: No cysts, no thickened lining of the uterin wall. No anything that might be deemed “remarkable.” So… next she drew some blood and checked all my hormone levels and discovered, again, precisely nothing. Apparently, all my hormone levels are normal. Turns out I’ve got all the right girlie ones and all the right not so girlie ones. And, here’s the kicker, I have the exact right amounts of each.

Woo Hoo! I mean, this is cause for celebration right? Great! No problems! I’m perfectly fine! Yay!

Except… oh yeah. I don’t have periods and I’m losing my hair.
So… what’s next?

Apparently, what’s next is 2 more pills a night in the form of 400mg of prometrium. Even though, as I mentioned above, my hormone levels are all normal.

Don’t worry. I don’t understand it either.

According to my doctor, estrogen is stored in fat. And because I have so much fat, my body thinks that it doesn’t need to make anymore…. and because my body has shut down its little pink estrogen factory, I’m not having periods. All of which sounds good except that none of that really explains why my estrogen levels are *normal* or why I’m losing my hair or what will happen to me if, given the fact that my estrogen levels *are* normal, I start taking what seems to be a pretty large dose of *more* estrogen.

I asked my doctor all of these questions and even though she tried to be reassuring, the truth is that, in my opinion anyway, she really didn’t have very good answers. She said that the bottom line was that I needed to start having periods again and that not having them presented more risks than a few months worth of extra estrogen did. She said that the idea was that by taking the prometrium, we were essentially “jump starting” my own natural systems and that with this little nudge *hopefully* my body would get back into the estrogen making business and that *hopefully* once these cycles were back to normal I’d see the positive changes (regular periods and hair growth) that I was hoping for.

*hopefully*

*sigh*

None of this sounds very promising.

And you know, it pains me to say this, because I’m truly mortified by how shallow I’m being when it comes to all of this, but the fact of the matter is, I’ve been short and fat and dumpy my whole life… and, you know, I just don’t think I can take adding bald to that list. And I can’t tell you how much I wish the prospect of losing my hair didn’t bother me. But it does… it really, really does. And, I’m being totally honest when I say that, I am just not sure I can take it.

I mean, c’mon… really.

Those of you who have been fat your whole lives know what I’m talking about. I’ve endured the slings and arrows of others who think being fat makes you a deserving target of cruelty. I’ve spent my entire life being judged on the basis of my weight. I’ve never been pretty or attractive or anyone’s first choice for anything. I’ve always been fat. It’s utterly defined me. And let me just say, for the record, (and as though it needed to be said at all) that all of that sucks. It sucks. And at this point, when I think about the prospect of adding, to the endless list of ways that I’ve been humiliated or degraded in my life, the idea of being bald too… well, I just have to wonder how much more I’m going to have to endure.

And you know what the worst part is? The worst part is that all of this… all of it… is my own fucking fault. Sure… I could blame it on the fact that I grew up so poor that we literally lived in homeless shelters and under overpasses for part of my childhood and that even when we had a roof over our heads that food was always very scarce. Or maybe I could blame it on the times when, as a child, I was sent into stores wearing oversized clothing and told not to come home until I’d filled the pockets with shoplifted food. I’m sure there are countless other food related childhood traumas that I could point the finger at, and that no one would dispute as being perfectly reasonable explanations for why I’m fat and fucked up today.

But the fact is, I’m an adult. And, what’s more, I’ve been an adult for a long, long time now.

I have to own the fact that *I* am the only person who chooses the food that I put into my body.
*I* am the only one who controls when/if I go to the doctor.
Only *I* can choose to listen to my own body and…
Only *I* can choose to take care of it.

~~~

Forgive me.

I know this isn’t the kind of post that you’re used to seeing here… but all of this is bubbling inside me and, frankly, I’ve got nowhere else to let it spill.

David, my husband, has heard it all before and has nothing intuitive or supportive to offer me. He definitely doesn’t support me taking the hormones that the doctor recommended, but he also doesn’t have any alternate solution. He says he’ll support me no matter what I decide, but the reality is that he can’t possibly understand what I’m going through. He’s never gone a day having to want for anything, much less food, in his entire life. He doesn’t understand my relationship with food and even though I know it’s not intentional, sometimes he totally enables my unhealthy behavior. The bottom line is that I love him, but I can’t turn to him right now.

So… here I am.

For much of this post, I’ve kept my eyes closed… just letting my fingers flail over the keyboard as I purge everything that I’ve been dealing with over the last few weeks. I don’t expect any of you to have any answers, but knowing that I can let it go… that I can spill it all out and pin it to these darks walls, without fear of judgment or condemnation, is very liberating.

I don’t know what will happen next and I hope, for all of our sakes, that I can get back to talking about how much I hate exercising and having to calculate the number of calories in a banana (100) each day. But until then, I feel a little better knowing that none of this has to be a secret that I bury somewhere deep inside me and that, even if I never say any of these words out loud, I don’t really have to bear the burden of them entirely alone. Even if I get zero comments to this post, or even if a few of you choose to stop reading my thoughts as a result of this lunacy, I know that spilling it all here was the right thing to do. Yes. As i said at the onset of this post, I am a private person. But even I have to admit that I feel so much better tonight for having lifted the lid so that I could let off a little steam.

Thank you so much for listening.