Why i dont like doctors

Now don’t get me wrong, i believe we need doctors, after all, who else is going to put your finger together after you cut it off carving a pumpkin? They have a place and a purpose and i am grateful for that. so i guess that it would be more fitting to say that i don’t like general practitioners or their little toties they pass you off to. in the last four years it has been my experience that unless i have a cold or infection, they are pretty much useless.

I have already talked about the runaround i had while on a quest to find out what my shaking was all about but during that time i was also fighting a battle for my general health. On top of the shaking, depression and anxiety, i didn’t know, for the life of me, why i was so exhausted all the time. i had the hardest time thinking, i could no longer function. doing basic things like cleaning and cooking and getting dressed took everything out of me and as always, i was gaining weight. I also knew that a brain candy pill wasn’t going to help me, so i decided i had better find out what was the real problem, and fast.

My first thought was that it was my thyroid. Several of my friends suffer from an underactive thyroid or hypothyroidism and i am familiar with all the symptoms, i had most of them. i had already been tested a few times and was frustrated that the tests always came back with the score of someone who should be a size six. It just didn’t make sense to me so i did what i do best, internet research.

I discovered that most tests just test the TSH and not the other hormones that make up the inner workings of your thyroid. i found out that it was extremely possible to have an underactive thyroid and still test "normal". (i will give all the details about this subject in a forthcoming entry). Armed with this information and printed proof from my computer, i demanded my doctor give me another, thorough, detailed test. he was more than willing (which totally deflated the entire speech i had prepared to convince him) because he already knew everything i had told him.

*rant moment*
Let me line this up for you: i go to him because i am an all out wreck, but part of that is many symptoms of hypothyroidism, that is why he gave me the test in the first place. the test come back normal so he sends me on my merry way, leaving me to suffer for months before i come back and say "maybe we didn’t look close enough" and he basically says "i know, well, since you are here, let’s do that now."
Maybe you can tell me, why, if he saw all of my symptoms and knew that he should look closer, why the heck didn’t he the first time?!
*rant over*

The test did come back with some abnormalities this time, but he couldn’t help me, he had to send me to a specialist, an endocrinologist. An endocrinologist is a doctor who specializes in the study of the endocrine system in your body. that is all the glands that produce your hormones. i was lucky because a lot of people have to wait three to six months to get in with an endocrinologist, i was able to see one in two weeks.

I was very excited, finally i would be able to get the help that i needed, finally my life would return to normal, finally i would be able to shed my ugly fat! the doctor came in and looked at me, looked at my chart, asked me how i was feeling than sat back and began to lecture me. he told me that my test scores were fine and that all i needed to do was diet. he assured me that as i got older like him, i wouldn’t be able to consume as many calories and that it didn’t really have anything to do with my thyroid. he also assured me that all my other ailments were just in my head and that i should see a psychologist.

Ok, here is the thing, when you have a proven method of weight loss and all of a sudden it stops working and you gain weight instead, that is not normal! saying that as a fifty-something man he could no longer consume the 2000 calorie diet of his youth and that is why he had a potbelly is not the same for a woman who is not yet out of her twenties! he would not listen to me as i tried to plead my case. he suggested that i cut my calorie intake from 2000 to 1500 a day and we would see where we were in two weeks.

That may have seemed like a reasonable request on paper (less calories + caloric burn = weight loss) but really it only works for someone who wants to loose a few pound from the holidays or a model who's career depends on it. (i will have a lot more to say on this subject later) The idea of starving myself, (because that’s what that would be) the sheer anxiety of adding hunger and calorie counting to my stress load was too much for me. It wasnt that i was unwilling to eat healthy, it was just that what he was saying was ridiculous and unhealthy.

By the time we were done with my appointment i was in tears. i had gone in there with so much hope, i had been praying for help, and he had utterly crushed me. i sobbed in my car in the parking lot before i drove home.

I was depressed for a while, but i am also a determined woman, i demanded that my doctor refer me to a different endocrinologist. this time i was not so lucky, i had a three month wait ahead of me.

Those months were like riding the waves of a stormy sea. i would rise high on the expectations of a doctor's help and then fall into a depression as i was written off or passed off to another doctor who never bothered to look past a test that said i was fine. i obviously was not. up, down, up, down and all the time my anxiety and depression and growing waistline raged all around me. at times i began to wonder again if i really was just crazy, if it was all in my head but deep down i knew that i wasn’t and i kept praying for an answer.

That summer i was given a wonderful opportunity to go out to California for several weeks with my husband and children. we would be taking a workation, taking over my mom's nanny job during the week and hitting the beach every weekend. i love the bay area of California and was very excited for the change of pace and scene.

Going out to California meant that i would have to miss my long awaited appointment with the endocrinologist but as luck would have it i was able to take someone else’s canceled appointment just a day before we left. This doctor listened to me and looked me over really good and sent me for a gauntlet of tests. she said that taking these test was like taking a snapshot of my body and that they may not reflect how i was feeling (no kidding, right?) and that she wouldn’t just write me off if i was still not feeling well. that did comfort me until she called me with my results a couple weeks later.

She told me that my thyroid was fine, that i had signs of insulin resistance and had low vitamin D. she didn’t know what all of that meant or what to do for me but that i should look up a book on insulin resistance and take a vitamin D supplement. yadda, yadda, yadda....she never called.

As you can imagine i was disheartened. i did look up some info on insulin resistance which I found out is the precursor to diabetes (more on this subject later) but opted not to take a vitamin D pill. i figured that if my body was having a hard time making it from the massive amounts of sunshine i had been getting, a supplement wasn’t going to get the job done. once again, i prayed for an answer.

I received an answer to my prayers one day as i was preparing for a family outing to the beach. I was looking for a good magazine to read while working on my tan and was attracted to one that had "bio identical hormones" written across it. It was the magazine First for Woman, one of those two dollar magazines that every month promotes the latest and greatest in weight loss. (they are my literary junk food and i love to indulge ever so often)

I had heard a bit about bio identical hormones before. while waiting for my doctors to come to their senses and give me a prescription that would make my thyroid work like a well oiled machine and melt all my unwanted fat, (hey, that is exactly what happened to one of my friends) i was determined to find a supplement (legal or un) on my own so that i could finally end my (and my family's) suffering. I had been determined to take matters into my own hands because no matter what my doctors were saying, i knew something was wrong with me. it simply did not add up that i could have a healthy thyroid while haveing the sympotoms of an underactive thyroid!(I warned you, i can be freakish about this sort of stuff) what i learned was that thyroid bio identical hormones are from natural sources so that your body uses them better, but that you still need a prescription. Always willing to learn more, i got the magazine.

I was disappointed at first to see that it was talking about estrogen and progesterone (a hormone i was not very familiar with) but as i read the stories, i was amazed; it was like they were telling me my life! in a three page article i found that having a unbalance between your estrogen and progesterone causes you to have anxiety, depression, low sex drive, weight gain, insomnia, tender breasts, mood swings, brain fog, migraines... basically bad pms all the time and that is just the beginning. basically it listed everything i had been suffering for the last three years and the stories of the woman in the article were like pages out of my diary.

What was even more wonderful to find out was that to confirm if that that was my problem, all i had to do was take an at home saliva test. no doctor visit, just order it on line, spit in the vile and send it in. What was even better was that if that was my problem, the fix was even easier! i just go to my local health food store and get a bottle of bio identical progesterone cream, OTC. i was flabbergasted! no doctors to go through, no several weeks of waiting to be heard, no "i don’t know what’s wrong with you", no stupid chemical prescriptions with gosh-awful side affects!

I ordered the test, i spit in the vile, i waited on pins and needles for the test results and when i got them they confirmed that i was indeed out of balance. the normal range for my progesterone for that time in my monthly cycle should have been around 175, my test came back at 44.

It is a funny thing, because i expected that when i finally was able to know what was wrong with me i would be so happy and relieved, just to know. here i was with the cause and cure finally presented to me ......and i was spitting mad.

I was grateful but overwhelmingly furious! all of those times i went to a doctor for help! all of those horrible times i was stuck in the deep dark places of my mind! the years, the wasted years that i could not be the mother my children deserved or the woman my husband fell in love with! all because of a freakin hormone imbalance! What three doctors and two endocrinologists couldn’t tell me, i found out in a two dollar grocery store magazine.