After the gloomy pictures and tone of this post I'm overdue posting something cheerful that reflects how I'm feeling A BILLION TIMES BETTER, so here are some happy pictures from a recent members-only gallery and an update on what's going on in my body and head.



It's hard for me to describe how profoundly different/healed I felt within a week of starting to treat my hormone problems. I can only compare it to what born again Christians feel like. Seriously. Only I feel like I just established a close personal relationship with NORMALCY rather than with Jesus. And now I am wondering how the fuck I was even getting out of bed at all, because I was really REALLY sick.

A lot of stuff that I was experiencing I couldn't even verbalize without sounding totally crazy and was effecting me on every level you can possibly think of: mentally, spiritually, physically, socially, sexually, etc. My muscles, joints, head, eyes, guts, boobs, feet, jaw, ears HURT and weren't working right. Pretty much everything was causing me pain and fatigue, from the sound of people's voices to the loud conversations being held in my head to the TORTURE of dropping something and having to go through the agonizing, soul-sucking motion of bending over to pick it up. I thought I was being a hypochondriac to worry that I had lupus or something horrifying going on. All I wanted to do was work and be happy and do the millions of things I want to do, so I tried to exercise more, to cut back on things that were especially tiring (which got to the point of being EVERYTHING except the bare minimum -- I haven't been seeing my family, friends, or doing anything except trying to survive). The slightest annoyances were sending me into paroxysms of mean-spirited anguish. If you think I was complaining a lot about headaches and stuff, you don't know the tenth of it. I actually didn't even want to recognize how incredibly bad it was.

But then last week I started to feel INCREDIBLY GOOD. Like I looked in the mirror and didn't see death warmed over staring back at me -- oh yeah, THAT'S what I look like without a sickly pallor and giant, deep, dark circles rimming my eyes! Like, getting out of bed in the morning IS EASY and something to celebrate instead of something that caused me physical pain. I'm not exaggerating, I had been feeling PAIN reverberating through every fiber of my being. I thought it was just me being not-a-morning-person, "sensitive", etc. but as it turns out? FUCK NO. The first three days of feeling awesome last week are my new standard for how I should feel 99% of the time and I'm not going to accept anything less ever again.



Here are the supplements I started taking:

*Evening Primrose Oil
*iodine
*birth control (chick hormones)
*omega oils
*potassium (in grapefruit juice, etc.)
*awesome Vitamin B complex
*digestive enzymes

and changes I made:

*maintaining a stable blood sugar level (not letting myself get hungry, eating way less simple carbs/sugars)
*continuing to use tools & learn more for anger management, concentration, calm, etc.
*exercising consistently
*continuing to make 8-9 hours of sleep per night my goal

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A lot of these are things I've done before that yielded positive results, but I never did them consistently or all at the same time or appreciated the importance of spending the money to stay stocked up on all of the vitamins or understood the big picture of how they were helping me. I still don't have a thorough grasp of that, but getting as totally fucked up as I was forced me to do a lot of research and over the years a lot of people and circumstances have handed me clues. Like not being able to get pregnant and slowly finding out a whole bunch of possible reasons why not. Like having people tell me over and over and over again to have my thyroid tested. Like having almost no stressors in my life and often doing everything right and trying my fucking hardest and still feeling WORSE instead of better. Like having some really great health care providers in my life and then having to deal with one who was really bad. Like THE INTERNET being an imperfect but still fucking fabulous resources. Like having a trans partner and thinking more about hormones, identity, and the nuances of gender. Like having people tell me I have too much testosterone. Like having my hair stylist tell me I had an unnatural amount of HAIR FALLING OUT OF MY HEAD (ahhh, so it WASN'T my imagination that was noticing my part widening in pictures and on the webcam I have staring down at the top of my head).



I really am sorry for how impatient I've been, how easily agitated I've been, and for how little time I've had for people and issues and projects I care about. Mostly I'm sad that Delia had to live with someone so unpredictable and "touchy". But I'm really happy for us now that we are both getting ourselves sorted out.

I think this year (or at least the next six months) are going to be a time of simply catching up on time I/we've lost personally and financially/professionally. I know I've made a lot of posts in the past couple of years about ways I was reorganizing and reprioritizing things, and while many of them were necessary, very few of them were productive or successful because of what I now realize was a significant health problem. I am going to be patient with myself and try to enjoy simply feel good. REALLY good.

I'm not saying my life has been nonstop misery because that's not true at all -- hormones are shifty fuckers so there've been lots of highs and lows and near-normalcy, but I've likely been suffering from this for most of my post-adolescent life to one degree or another judging from how rarely I ovulated on time or at all; most people would say "judging from how rarely my period was on time", but I now refuse to refer to on-time periods as the sensible indicator of health when it totally ignores that timely menstruation is reliant on timely ovulation. It's not that I think ovulation is some holy fucking grail or that every woman should strive for FERTILITY, I just think there's so much MISSING from (and deceptive about) our language for talking about how our bodies function and how to identify problems and heal them. And you know how women who understand their clits and their g-spots and the rest of their bodies and how they work and where those parts live CAN MAKE THEM OPERATE BETTER and experience more pleasure? I don't think the rest of our anatomy and functionality is any different. If I understand that high blood sugar and cortisol and stress and testosterone and estrogen suppression and ovulation and concentration and happiness are all linked up and I can visualize those things and better know how to achieve stability there, then I am going to be a happier, better-functioning person.

Personally I'm excited about the discoveries I'm making about myself and feel so fired up about so many things I'm back to my "normal" scatterbrained whirlwind of divided attention (and haven't been taking Ritalin since I started my little regimen above). I'm also really angry and thinking a lot about how most health care providers are totally incompetent and uncaring when it comes to endocrinology (unless it has to do with diabetes) and SUPER COMMON hormone problems. I believe to my core that misogyny is the root of the ignorance and lack of care; people believe and want women to age a certain way, to become dried-up shrews. They believe we'll complain about anything and are still mostly just hysterical, crazy bitches and that our problems are all psychological. Everyone thinks it's so "advanced" to treat depression and anxiety as real stand-alone illnesses now that we can throw fucked-up, addictive drugs at when so much depression and anxiety and other mental illness are probably caused by hormonal problems that don't always originate with (or aren't limited to) poor brain chemistry or treated best just by addressing them. I'm certainly not suggesting we all go Tom-Cruise-Vitamin-Crazy, I'm just saying that health care professionals aren't even bothering to test for or treat underlying hormone imbalances, and most people like it that way. It makes a lot of women sicker, not healthier. Just to give you an example, this doctor I went to was ready to put me on anti-depressants, didn't believe me when I told her I knew the birth control itself would help a lot, and refused to test my thyroid (the most common "thyroid" test done is for TSH -- thyroid stimulating hormone -- and it doesn't really test your thyroid gland, it tests your pituitary gland AND the results are months old by the time it reaches your blood). You have to wonder how this woman thinks that anti-depressants are going to cure me of hair loss, weight gain, constipation, lethargy, etc. when you know it will make most of those symptoms WORSE. To her I was just a crazy, miserable bitch demanding a "complicated" explanation for what seemed obvious to her: THAT I'M SIMPLY A CRAZY MISERABLE BITCH.

If we removed the stigma and value judgment from the statement "she's got hormone problems" we'd lose one of our most precious and reliable punch lines. So many women would feel so much better the world would be turned upside-fucking down. It probably wouldn't be very good for the sex industry, I imagine, if more middle-aged women felt like a million bucks. Or maybe it would . . . . My sister, a nurse, said she thinks endocrinology is too nuanced for traditional western medicine to deal with and that it's not a "sexy" field like surgery. I think it's the opposite. It's the sexiest field of all. It IS the source of what we think of as sex and gender and for us to really understand it and the role it plays in our lives and how it is the foundation for so much of our identities would pose such a threat to the status quo and to the people we rely upon to make the rest of us feel normal by comparison that it's just a giant taboo. In generations to come I think it's transgender and people who defy gender stereotypes and limitations who will force the medical community and other people to understand endocrinology a whole lot better and how hormones can be manipulated to help us lead our best, most authentic and healthiest lives.

Anyway, long post short, I was feeling pretty bad. And now I feel really great. And that makes me really happy. I'm fueling up now for good things to come.

Labels: dildo, health, hormones, identity, migraines, natural boobs, PHOTOS, pop culture, PORNOGRAPHY, rants, thanksgiving

posted by Trixie at 2/05/2009 04:14:00 PM -