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My Best Friend's Birthday

Reposting what I wrote on this day last year.

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Today is my best friend’s birthday!!

She’s a beautiful, kind, generous, selfless, strong, smart, funny and classy woman. As long as I’ve known her, I’ve aspired to be like her.

It’s very rare in life to say you have someone who has absolutely always been there for you and who’s never let you down. She’s that person for me. She’s someone who’s always supported me even when she hasn’t agreed with my decisions. No matter what I know she’s always in my corner.

She’s someone I can cry with just as easily as I can laugh. She’s someone who I can trust with all of my secrets. She’s someone who knows me better than I know myself which can honestly be annoying at times when she just gives me “the look” until I decide to spill my guts to her.

She’s someone I always have fun with no matter what we’re doing. Even mundane errands turn into adventurous giggle-fests when we do them together.  I often tell her she’s never matured past age 12 since she’s never lost the big hearted innocence that adulthood so often rips away from us. She laughs easily and often. One of my favorite things is when I know what I’m saying is going to make her laugh that full bellied laugh that brings tears to her eyes. I love knowing that with all the ways I can count on her, she can always count on me to make her laugh.

She’s someone who always has a smile on her face and even on her toughest days, she’ll give anyone a shoulder to cry on and an understanding and compassionate ear to talk to.

If you asked her other friends about her they’d call her strong… kind… classy… funny… selfless… smart…   generous…  the list goes on and on...

But I just call her Momma.

Happy Birthday Momma. I love you the mostest!

xoxo

Medical Updates

After getting a call last Tuesday that my doctor would call with test results… and hearing nothing, I finally spoke to her (briefly) on Thursday afternoon.

The results of the breast scan show that the lump is a lymph node. I have to repeat the scan in 6 weeks and if it’s still there, we’ll entertain the idea of biospying it. So I’m waiting for 6 weeks.  With a lump and a rash that have already been here for 6 weeks. And doing nothing for it. Well, I’m freaking out plenty, but that’s not going to help it go away. With each day that passes my pain worsens and the rash worsens and all I can do is watch. My doctor said these things happen and usually go away on their own, but I want to know WHY it’s there and what kind of an infection my body is presently fighting to make it a problem. Usually antibiotics or antivirals are used to shrink an inflamed lymph node but she doesn’t think they’re necessary. If it’s something that’s just going to disappear, why am I in pain? Why do I have this rash? Why has it already been here for 6 weeks? If it’s still here in 6 weeks, and clearly not just a passing infection, then WHAT could it be? All the scan did was leave me with more questions, more uncertainty, and more things to stress out about. Every day I wake up wondering if in 6 weeks I’ll find out if I have cancer. And I wonder if there’s something more I should be doing now.

The pelvic scan did give me some answers, but I can’t say that I liked them. My history with PCOS is well documented here… or as well I’m willing to document it. The scan showed a 4.8 cm cyst on my right ovary. If it reaches 5 cm, it will have to be surgically removed. It explains the pain I’ve been in. It explains why there’s a consistent level of pain that suddenly gets so intense it brings me to my knees. But unfortunately it also shows that my surgery and the IUD aren’t alleviating my PCOS as well as we thought, or hoped, they would. When I got those results, the “you’ll never have children” chant suddenly started echoing once again in my mind.

Right now I feel defective. I feel broken. And I feel more scared about my health than I've been in a very long time. 

So for at least the next 6 weeks, my awareness ribbon looks like this:

(Thanks Jaimie for making the ribbon!!)

Teamwork

I talk/blog/tweet very often about how amazing my Endo is but that doesn’t mean we always see eye to eye. I think this is largely due to the fact that the perspective and goals of a doctor are very different from the perspective and goals of the patient. This is not to say that one viewpoint is better or more “right” than the other, just different.

My appointment yesterday was the first time I’d seen her since May. I wanted to talk about the lows I’ve been having or, more specifically, the lows I’ve been missing. I haven’t been having many “kinda” lows where I catch myself in the 70s and treat. I’ve been asymptomatic until I’m in “holy shit” low territory and I’m sweating and shaking and shoving glucose tabs in my mouth. “Kinda” lows I can work through – treat, continue what I was doing, recheck in 15 minutes, etc – but the “holy shit” lows stop me dead in my tracks. It takes hours to feel better even after my numbers have improved. It’s even more worrisome when they happen at clinical when I’m responsible for patients or when they happen right before bed.

I talked with her about it thinking she would agree it was time for a CGM. But she surprised me. She said she wants me to cut the lizard spit dosage in half. My a1c was down again and she thinks cutting the dose will still result in an acceptable a1c. She did, however, say if I could get my hands on a CGM to use when I’m cutting back the dose it would help me get a better eye on my trends and if I’m still experiencing lows, it would give us more information to provide the insurance company when we fight to get me one of my own.

The only thing I could think when she told me to cut back the dosage was “I’m going to get fat.” I can’t tell you how much I hate that that was all I could think about, but truly, it was the first thing that crossed my mind.

Byetta is as notorious for its weight loss side effects as it is for its extreme nausea. In my mind, I started adding everything up. Increased weight will increase my bgs and insulin resistance which will push my hormone ratios back to the wonky side and set my PCOS back to batshit. And if my PCOS goes batshit, then I’m back in “will I ever be able to have children” territory which will be rapidly approaching anyway if my a1c gets too high with the lower dose. It’s both amazing and incredibly infuriating how quickly a chain reaction can be set off in the body. If that happened or if there was a drastic increase in my numbers with the decreased dose, I’d then have to work back up to the dose I’m on now which means I’d be most likely subjecting myself once again to that extreme nausea. There’s no way I could possibly function in school in that condition. So this raises the question: do I wait until this semester’s over to do it? Or do I just do it now and hope for the best?

I truly haven’t figured out whether or not my fears about this plan are from what I know about my body and how it reacts to the Byetta in terms of initially getting on it, how it reacts when I have to skip a dose due to low bg or not being hungry enough for it, how nauseated I get with the next dose I take after skipping one, and how without fail I get nauseated with the first doses from a new pen. Or if it’s simply from the fear of gaining weight on a lesser dose. But what I love about my Endo is that she’s giving me time to figure this out. She’s letting me do this my way. She didn’t talk about cutting my dose in half as something I have to start doing right now, but rather as an idea I could consider after I’m back in the swing of things at school.  She didn’t say “you have to cut back your dose right now” but mentioned it as something worth trying when I’m comfortable with it. I love that even when we don’t necessarily agree on what the best course of action is I still know that above all else she and I are a team and all we want is what’s best for my health.