So very very tired…

This morning I woke up disoriented. I thought I heard Rodents Of An Unusual Size (ROUS) chomping on the drywall of my parents work studio where we’ve been living since the end of May, but when I opened my eyes I discovered it was a dragonfly trapped in the skylight above my bed. His wings were clicking against the glass. Delightful. So much better than ROUS.

I tripped my way over boxes and piles of stuff I had started unpacking last night and made my way to my master suite bathroom. As I peed I smiled to myself. I am the proud recipient of a lease that says I get to enjoy a master suite bathroom for a minimum of 2 years. The ROUS infected studio is a thing of the past.

I’ve been intentionally avoiding posting on my blog because I’m overwhelmed and tired. My life has been seriously de-railed over the last few months.

Remember that healing cleanse I did last year? Well, our stop-gap home at my parents had very limited space, and they had no room to store prepared food in the fridge so we started eating a lot of easy quick food. Pizza, frozen meals, cheese sandwiches, chocolate, soda, chips, ice cream, and a LOT of restaurant meals…

It’s mid-July now and my menses have been regular since my cleanse (less the 11 weeks I was pregnant), but ever since the D&C my monthly has been incredibly heavy and energy-sucking, and then I spend the rest of the month completely drained and exhausted.

I keep trying to break the cycle of bad eating and low energy, but by 10 AM I don’t have the energy to get through my day so I grab something quick for that boost – usually full of caffeine and sugar.

Last weekend we moved into our new home. It’s fabulous. It has the best view of the ocean and Mudge Island, a large fenced garden that I’m sharing with the landlord, and the space works incredibly well for our family. I love organizing. It’s just a weird quirk I have. Yet, I have no desire to unpack. Each day feels completely overwhelming. This is not like me. I usually enjoy setting up in a new place. This time feels different. Tiring. I just want to go to bed and sleep with no interruptions. Don’t touch me. Don’t talk to me. Don’t ask me questions. Just leave me be so I can sleep.

The things that motivated me in the past aren’t working.

We took a vacation in mid-June. It was a whirlwind holiday to Seattle, WA. We rode the Amtrak train from Vancouver to Seattle, saw Bill Cosby live, took our son to the Seattle Zoo, took the monorail to the Space Needle, visited the Science Center, IMAX theatre, Music Experience Museum, Sci-Fi Museum, and basically wore myself out more than I was before we left. I need a holiday to recover from our holiday.

I cut all my hair off (see pic above). I love the new look, but still no umph.

I weighed myself. I’ve gained 15 lbs. I’m too tired to truly care enough to diet or exercise. I tried restricting my calories for a week or so and ended up eating 4000 calories one day. So yeah, not exactly helpful.

I re-started the Colonix Cleanse three days ago. I fill my water bottle with 8 cups of filtered water every morning. And drink it too! I take a handful of chlorella to help cope with the detox. I drink a protein shake with a high protein egg breakfast, and take an iron supplement every morning. I have such a bad headache by 1 PM that I usually cave and buy a skim latte and load it with sugar or buy a bottle of coke to get through the rest of the work day at the salon. I don’t have the energy to eliminate sugar and caffeine and dairy and wheat and whatever else it was that I wasn’t eating on the healing cleanse.

I bought a new bike. It was delivered Saturday night and we tried going for a bike ride Sunday morning. We made it as far as the cemetery (not far – but morbidly ironic). The bike ride and the heat completely laid me out and we had to go home so I could sleep.

I LOVE cooking organic healthy whole foods for my family. I am so exhausted I can barely stand long enough to make dinner. I thought the excitement of moving into a house with a kitchen and a fridge of my own again would motivate me, but instead I feel paralyzed and unable to function.

I don’t cope well in chaos. I have half unpacked boxes everywhere and nowhere to put stuff cause this place has so little storage. I did find a dresser at GIRO last night (thanks to a friend with a truck!), so that’s a start, I guess. I don’t have the energy to figure it out.

Is this depression? Are all the events of the spring finally catching up to me emotionally? Am I deficient in something? Is it my thyroid? Low Vit D? Anemia? What? I called to make a doctor’s appointment but they can’t fit me in till Friday, August 8th. It feels like a lifetime away.

Inconclusive and confusing ultrasound results

When I found out I was pregnant with my son I went in to have my first ultrasound thinking I was between 11 and 12 weeks, and came out being told I was only 7 weeks along. I hadn’t written anything down and wasn’t tracking, so I just took their new EDD with little comment or thought… I have polycystic ovaries so my “normal” is very wonky. I had only had three cycles the entire year I got pregnant with ds, so I wasn’t surprised that the dates were off… a month is a lot, but still… I can go 6 months without a cycle, so quite honestly, menses dates mean nothing to me… and I had no idea or inkling I was pregnant, so was sort of walking around in a daze anyways. I went into labor on his due date and he was a healthy full term 8 lb 8 oz baby two days after the revised due date they gave me at my first ultrasound.

Yesterday I went for my first ultrasound, thinking I was 11 weeks, because I’ve been having spotting and cramping for more than a week now and we were all concerned that I was possibly miscarrying.

The tech looked and looked and looked. She asked for the date of my last period. December 12th. Then she asked the date of the FIRST day of your last period. Yes, like I said, December 12th. How sure was I of my dates? Positive. I wrote it down.

I started getting nervous and asked if she could see a heart beat. Her answer was strange. Well… no… but you’re only measuring 6 weeks and 1 day, so that is normal. Huh?! My immediate thought was that the baby stopped growing and was no longer viable…

Then she swung the screen around and showed me that it likely IS viable. There was the yolk sac, the little perfect embryo, the amniotic water… The tech pointed out that the line around the uterus was clear and black, which doesn’t indicate any re-absorption, but rather growth. She also explained the spotting – implantation of the placenta.

I went out to the waiting room and told my husband and son I’d explain in the car. Prior to my appointment we had agreed that if the baby was gone, I would not invite them in, but if there was a heart beat they would come in to see. And here I was, still in limbo, with neither scenario!

Despite having polycystic ovaries, the month I got pregnant this time was the third month in a row I had a normal cycle after almost completing our healing cleanse.

When I got home I pulled up my fertility chart to see if I could make sense of it all. I started charting Dec 12th, the first day of my last period… I had signs of ovulation, and we had sex on Dec 26, Dec 29 and Jan 11th. We haven’t had sex since – we both had a horrible virus for a month, then I wasn’t feeling well, then I started spotting, so we know for SURE those are the only three possible conception dates…

I got my first positive pregnancy test result on January 12th, and referring to the cart, that would place my date of conception on December 29th, for a Sept 21st EDD. The pregnancy test was a strip. I got a positive… very very faint… couple hours later used another one and it was darker… went to the doctor’s office, and they confirmed it was positive too…

Yesterday I’m told that I have a totally normal looking viable 6 week old plus 1 day EMBRYO, putting my new due date at October 25th. I am SO confused I can’t even begin to tell you where my head is right now. That’s not possible. EVEN if I got pregnant on Jan 11th, it’s not even remotely possible I would have been able to have a positive pregnancy test on the 12th. And that still places my EDD at October 4th, NOT the 25th, so there’s still a 3 week discrepancy.

I also don’t know how to explain the whoosh whoosh of the placenta was that we heard on the doppler… or the fetal movement the doctor was sure he picked up… or the flutters I’ve been feeling… Indigestion?

I’m having my progesterone levels checked, and will hopefully have those results later this week.

Something showed up on my blood work that I am wondering about now too… apparently I have borderline hypothyroidism, which can cause slow fetal growth…

At the end of the day I’m still pregnant, albeit less pregnant than I thought. I don’t know what to think. So until I know otherwise, I’m thankful to be pregnant, and am praying for a healthy baby.

Infertility History & Fertility Charting

When I started menstruating at age 13 I started experiencing intense cramping and PMS symptoms with each cycle. My cycles were an average 28 days in length, but each month the PMS and cramping became more and more intense. There were some months where I would lie in my bed crying and clutching my abdomen for days on end. My mom was a midwife, so she would try to “coach” me into relaxing, but quite honestly that never helped. Nothing helped.

In my late teens I was at a funeral for a family friend when my cycle started. The cramps were so intense I had to leave to sit on the floor of a stall in the bathroom. The pain became so intense I passed out. I came around, lying on the cold tile bathroom stall floor. Doubled over in pain I found my way to a dark hallway and laid down to die. That’s where one of the ushers later found me. They called my parents out of the funeral, and I was sent to a friend’s house to rest, all of us attributing the pain to my usual intense “menstrual cramps”.

About a year later my menses started while I was at work, and those familiar blindingly painful cramps I had experienced at the funeral again doubled me over in pain. Again I sought refuge in the bathroom, trying to get a handle on the pain. Again I passed out. This time when I came around to the sound of my boss banging on the door, I recognized these weren’t just any old cramps. Something was wrong. I consulted my MD, and he confirmed that in both instances a cyst on my ovary had burst. He had no advice to offer, said there was no cure, and told me to go home and carry on.

I started taking the birth control pill when I was 22 years old because I was getting married, and didn’t want to get pregnant right away. My usual intense menstrual cramps became a thing of the past, and my PMS symptoms were pretty much gone. I stayed on the pill for around 2 years.

When we decided we were ready to start trying to conceive I stopped taking the pill, and expected I would get pregnant within a couple of months. I was very discouraged to discover that my menses would never resume a normal 28 day cycle. That first year I only had 3 cycles. I knew I had been unofficially diagnosed with PCOS in my teens, so I made an appointment to see my doctor (a different one) to find out what my options were. She told me I wasn’t ovulating, and pregnancy was not possible, but she would refer me to a fertility specialist.

Imagine our surprise when a routine pregnancy test turned up positive! No need to pursue fertility treatments, I had my baby!

My menses resumed 12 weeks after giving birth to my son. It never regulated again. I would go for weeks feeling totally PMS without it ever starting. My MD told me about Metformin, and the discovery that PCOS is linked to insulin imbalances. She started me on a low dosage, and slowly increased the dosage until I was taking around 2250 mg a day. No change. The side effects were brutal. I was always bloated and gassy and felt really sick all the time.

Early 2008 I finally got tired of the hormonal roller coaster and asked for a fertility endocrinologist referral. After an internal sonogram that confirmed multiple cysts on my ovaries (he was able to count over 20 on each side) I was officially diagnosed with Poly Cystic Ovarian Syndrome (PCOS) in April of 2008. He kept me on the Metformin until I couldn’t handle the side effects any longer and had to stop taking it.

At the same time my husband was diagnosed with infertility as well, and was scheduled for a surgery that we hoped would reverse his diagnosis. We waited anxiously for the results of his follow up testing.

Next the specialist advised me to consider taking a synthetic ovulation stimulating drug. The waiver he sent home with us outlined all the possible risks and side effects, and convinced both me and my husband that we were not prepared to pursue fertility in this manner. In addition we learned that the surgery my husband had undertaken was not successful.

Last summer my SIL, who is a Traditional Chinese Medicine Doctor, generously and serendipitously offered to diagnose and treat our entire family. On August 11th we started her healing treatment plan, which I’ve discussed in great detail on this site (if you’re new to this site, select the topic “healing cleanse” from the Fascinating Topics drop down list in the sidebar).

I am excited to share that I have now had two normal cycles in a row!

I have always wanted to try charting my cycles, but they were so irregular it was like talking underwater. No matter how hard you try, it just doesn’t make sense. I’ve decided to start charting this month, and found the following videos about fertility charting on Fertility Friend, the site I will be using to track my cycles.

The Healing Cleanse and my PCOS

This self portrait is a real commentary on how I viewed myself before starting our healing cleanse. I took this picture in June of this year, and it really represented the broken hurting person I was, my image blurred by the dirt of obesity and ill health.

I’ve had PCOS since my teens, and although my cycles were relatively “normal”, I suffered from severe PMS, menstrual cramps, and had cysts burst on two different occasions. The pain was so intense I passed out both times. The only time I’ve ever passed out in my entire life.

When I was 22 years old I went on the Pill for a few years. When I stopped the Pill I assumed my cycles would just resume, but they never did. I was 25 years old and my cycles averaged 90-120 days. The year I got pregnant with my son I only had 3 cycles. They told me I wouldn’t be able to get pregnant because I wasn’t ovulating, so imagine my shock and joy when I went in for a fertility specialist referral, and came out with a positive pregnancy test!

For the past year I have not had a single natural mense. I’ve taken three rounds of synthetic progesterone to induce periods, and the rest of the year I just didn’t get any.

When I started this healing cleanse, the biggest change was to my diet. Eliminating all sugar and sweeteners meant that my 2-3 cans of cola were cut out cold turkey, and all the sweets we snacked on became a thing of the past. I truly believed that the weight would just melt off.

Not so.

There was a 2 week period where I felt like it was a complete failure and waste of my time because I was gaining weight, and still wasn’t getting my period or feeling any hormonal changes. But I persevered, largely in part because my Dr. D was firm and confident that I would see results if I just stayed the course.

The last few days I felt incredibly hormonal. My face broke out like it used to when I was a teen. My stomach felt bloated. I have been extremely tired. I was irritable for no good reason. I suspected one of two things. Either I was pregnant or my period was going to start.

Even though there was that small suspicion in the back of my mind, I was still surprised when my period started just 5 weeks and 2 days since my last one (induced after 3 months of not getting one – again). I have to admit this is the first time that I’ve ever welcomed normal painful menstrual cramps.

Am I glad I stuck with it? Hell, yeah! I’ve lost 19 lbs in 3 months, my stomach doesn’t ever hurt anymore (well, except for the menstrual cramps!), and I am eating the way I’ve always aspired to, but never thought I had the time or patience to pull it off.

I’ve found ways to get at least 45 grams of protein in everyday, so I am not always drinking the protein shakes any longer. If I find I’m low on protein, I make sure I drink one, but otherwise I prefer getting the protein through food.

I’m taking 6 grams of chlorella instead of 12 grams now, and may cut that back even more because I’m no longer dealing with any cravings.

I’m averaging 1200-1300 calories a day, and am slowly working on getting more fitness into my life. I have been losing an average of 1-3 lbs a week fairly consistently now. I never feel the need to cheat, and I’m actually really enjoying the foods I prepare. I start my day with two organic eggs and some homemade kamut soda bread, and that really holds me well until lunch. I usually keep a big pot of veggie bean chili, a pot of brown rice, and either some cooked beets or squash ready in the fridge so I have something substantial and healthy to eat if I need something quick.

I take 2 magnesium capsules, an allergy homeopath tincture, and 6 grape fruit seed extracts every night before bed.

The biggest change is inside my mind though. I am believing in my ability to change and blossom, and I’m happy and ready to embrace my thinner healthier self.

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