PCOS, RNY, and Me...

Sep 19, 2011

http://ca.news.yahoo.com/6-infertile-women-pregnant-weight-loss-surgery-001204240.html

I got my first period on my 12th birthday.  Prior to that, I had been an "early bloomer," started wearing a bra in 2nd grade, had seen endocrinologists, had body odor and pubic hair.  I was surprised (as were my parents probably) that I didn't start until I was 12.  But after that first period and the one that followed, I never had a normal one again.  I would go months and months, a few times I even went over a year, without having another period.  And when I would get them they could last for weeks.  While I had always been a chubby kid, I was not obese until this time, either.  Along with that period came about 100 pounds in the span of a year, and while I still played a multitude of sports year round, my doctor called me a lazy hypochondriac (I came to him with a 2 page list, that when I read it now it reads textbook PCOS...he dismissed it) and nothing further was done.  I graduated high school weighing around 250 pounds at 5'7'' (the same height I'd been since 6th grade).

When I was 21, I finally just went to my Dad's doctor and said look I'm pretty sure this is me, can you please read it and send me for bloodwork?  I handed her 2 articles and a blurb from a medical book about PCOS, and waited while she read.  I also handed her that list from 1995 as well as my doctor's office notes (it was now 2003), and she actually had tears in her eyes when she said to me how sorry she was that someone would dismiss this for all these years, and hopefully we could turn it around so someday I might have children.  I believed the latter to be highly unlikely, since my then fiance and I had been having unprotected sex for years, and I had multiple what I know now to be chemical pregnancies, but nothing more than that.  

She became my doctor, and for a year we tried the standard therapy: diet, exercise, metformin, and aldactone.  What a horrible, horrible medication metformin is.  I've been off it for over a year now and still have gastrointestinal damage that is repairing itself...not to mention the fatty liver it caused.  We were unable to achieve any results, and I actually gained weight despite being on a supervised diet & exercise plan, and taking my medications as prescribed.  So off I went to an endocrinologist.  The first one was a flop, but then I stumbled upon a young, recent med school graduate who was just starting off her career.  She was still open to exploring and researching non-traditional routes of treatment, so we got along great.  We tried so many things, I can't even remember them all anymore.  There were injections, pills, frequent blood & urine & saliva tests...more stomach problems...hairy face & zits all over; but she never stopped trying.  After a few years, it became obvious I just wasn't going to respond to anything other than something drastic, and after seeing my father lose over 200 pounds after RNY, I was ready for drastic.  Anything that would fix me.  Anything that would make me feel like a real woman, and not this dried up disgustingly fat blob I had become, unable to do even the most basic of what's expected of a woman...bear children.  So we started what would become a 5 year journey to get approved for surgery.  Along the way I got married, and to our thrill got pregnant and carried a baby past the first few weeks, but then miscarried just shy of 8 weeks.  After that, there were 3 more chemical pregnancies, at which point I said ENOUGH.  I went on the pill, and we waited and waited until August 14th, 2011, when I became eligible through my employer to have RNY surgery.  

I'm so happy to know that even small changes in my weight affect my fertility so much...we are hoping to be fruitful & multiply as soon as I've been cleared to start trying.  We know that may be a couple years away, but it is well worth the wait.

And today begins my 1 week countdown until I have my RNY.  At 7:30am on Monday, September 26th, 2011, my life changes forever!

G

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