Bad News, Good News

"So, yeah, I think anything is possible. I know it because I’ve lived it. I know it because I have seen it. I have witnessed things the ancients would have called miracles, but they are not miracles. They are the products of someone’s dream..." ~ Whoopi Goldberg

I had my doctor's appointment yesterday. I was anxious to have it, and anxious about having it.

I was going to get the results back from both blood and urine samples that had been taken; the blood was going to let my doctor understand what was going on with my fertility; basically if I was still in the game or on the way to the bench, so to speak, and also find out how my thyroid was functioning - if the the meds I'm on for that were doing their job of keeping that hormone balanced. The urine sample was going to tell her about my brain functioning - neurotransmitter levels - and how that might be affecting me.

Because I had told her that it wasn't just my fertility that was on my mind, but I was constantly tired. I've been sleeping for 10 1/2 hours - at least - each night and still feel tired during the day. I mean I've always needed at least eight hours of sleep each night, nine being my optimum, but ten to twelve hours was not normal by even my need-for-sleep standards.

Also, my nausea had come back with a vengeance over the past month-and-a-half. The nausea has not left me these past four years, but there are varying degrees of it, and the degree I have been in of late is the one that does more than challenge me physically, it challenges me mentally. It's the kind of illness that makes me have to want to live... and if you've followed this blog, you will know, that sometimes, when it is at its worst, it has made me not want to...

Anyway, I had written in that previous post that though my OV watch had said I ovulated in late January, I never had a period. My last period, in fact, was January 5th. And when I never had my period in February, but felt like I had ovulated, Dr. M. did some blood work on me that was, as I said then when I got the results back, disheartening: my FSH had gone out of the normal range... it was high.

Well, the bad news I got yesterday when I went in for my doctor's appointment was that all of my brain neurotransmitters: serotonin, dopamine, epinephrine, with the exception of my, norepinephrine, where so vastly depleted that Dr. M. was "baffled." I am taking both pharmaceutical medications and supplements which had gotten them to higher levels and she just was confounded at how drastically they had dropped.

So, on that front, I will have to go back to my neuropsychiatrist and have her do what she is trained to do: fix my neurotransmitters. I remember, years ago, where I used to live, I would drive a couple hours to the "big" city and see this integrative medical specialist and he had told me that serotonin was like the God of the body; if it was depleted its negative repercussions could go far and wide throughout the body... a trickle down effect, affecting everything.

The next bit of bad news was that my thyroid wasn't functioning well either. But the good news, as my doctor told me, was that all of those bad news problems were fixable.

But the very best news I got was that the blood work done to monitor my fertility hormones, FSH, included, were right back where they had been... really good. When I asked Dr. M. if she was surprised by the results, she said that her feeling seeing the levels being so good wasn't of surprise, but of relief... "extremely relieved" she told me.

She told me that according to the blood work I had probably just finished ovulating and she was/is sure that I will have a period coming up.

When I asked her why she thought I hadn't had a period since early January she said that probably, first and foremost, was that my going to the other side of the world, traveling there for a month, being so sleep-deprived, and then returning back to this side of the world could easily have caused my body to go haywire. And she said, once again, that older woman can tend towards ovulating twice in a month and when that happens the body just keeps producing the progesterone (I think that's the hormone) and so the communication is that there isn't any need to shed the uterine lining.

And, now that I know, not only has my thyroid been thrown off, but my neurotransmitters have been so drastically depleted, all of which is a major stressor on the body, I feel pretty sure that that is the source of why my body has felt like it has - tired - and why it hasn't worked like I wanted and needed it to.

Of course, my doctor wasn't the only one that was "extremely relieved" at finding out the good news regarding my continued healthy fertility... I was more than feeling that, I was, I am, feeling blessed.