My husband and I were newlyweds, eagerly awaiting our first child. My period was a week late, and I swear I had every early pregnancy symptom in the book: nausea, bloating, even food cravings! I was going to wait just another couple days before I took a test. They were expensive, I had heard, and I was doing my best to keep our spending as low as possible.
But then, heartbreak. The miserable witch Aunt Flow showed her ugly face anyways. At the time, I was sure I had miscarried. I guess it doesn't always happen the first month. Surely the next month it would all come together! Except it didn't. Once again, I was not pregnant. My period didn't just show up, it also wouldn't leave! I had weird spotting for 3 weeks, followed by a normal “period” bleeding pattern. It tapered back off to a light spotting. After 28 days of bleeding, it finally stopped. For a weekend. Then it started over again!
If this pattern had continued for even just a month or two, it would have been fine. Inconvenient, sure, but not the end of the world. Instead, it would not let up, continuing unabated for almost a year.
Something was obviously wrong, but what? I made an appointment with a local OB/GYN to try and get some answers. She was not particularly helpful. We didn't have enough data, she said. I had just become sexually active, which can make things weird for a bit. Leave it, and see what happens. She also prescribed me some progesterone pills to force a period, to see if that straightened things out. Spoiler: it didn't. I tried it for a month or two. It was certainly nice to not be bleeding constantly for those months. Once I stopped taking the medication, however, the long periods returned.
Frustrated, I stewed and festered for several months. My husband saw that this was not helpful and recommended I see a doctor, just to do something. I made and appointment with a naturopathic doctor. During the first appointment, I decided I liked her a lot. She seemed very knowledgeable, and she was an excellent listener. Under her care, I got a full blood work panel. We learned that my levels on everything were fine, except Vitamin D. That was severely deficient. The naturopath also suggested a hormone panel. Rather than going and getting my blood drawn, we did a number of saliva samples over the course of a month. This method would provide a fuller picture of how my hormones interacted with each other. The hormone panel results were more interesting than the blood work. My progesterone and estrogen were fine, but my testosterone was abnormally high. The doctor recommended reducing my simple carbohydrate intake (white flour, white potatoes, rice, sugar), as that can affect testosterone levels. I balked. Those were some of my favorite foods! They were cheap! What about our food budget? After some discussion with my husband, we decided it would be worth spending a little more on food for the sake of my health. I started focusing more on meats than carb sources, as well as including more vegetables.
At the naturopath's suggestion, I also made an appointment with a different OB/GYN. My issues seemed to be out of the naturopath's scope, and perhaps the doctor could more clearly see what was going on. Not too long after that, the naturopath and I parted ways.
By the time I got an appointment with the OB/GYN, I was seeing some improvement. Reducing my simple carbohydrates did seem to affect my periods. Exercise (we had begun to do some bodyweight exercise and High Intensity Interval Training, or HIIT, a few days a week) also seemed to have helped. My periods were by no means normal; they had simply gotten a little shorter. Rather than bleeding and spotting for 4 weeks at a time, I was bleeding for only 3 weeks at a time. Let me tell you, it was a vast improvement.
The new OB/GYN looked at all my blood work, my hormone panel, and my period charts. She listened as I explained what had been going on. Kindly, she explained that one or two weird periods per year is fairly normal, but I clearly had something else going on. This particular bleeding pattern indicated I was not ovulating. At all. The hormones triggered by ovulation without fertilization were not being released, which meant a true period was not occurring. That would also be why I was not getting pregnant. No egg, no pregnancy!
She recommended birth control to
regulate my period. Since I was wanting to conceive, that wasn't the
best option. Alternatively she prescribed more progesterone pills,
just to offer a break from bleeding for 3 weeks at a time. I took the
progesterone pills, and thanked her. At her suggestion, I also had an
ultrasound done, just to check for tumors or cancer. That came back
clean, nothing out of the ordinary.
After 18 months, I found myself with no real answers. My testosterone was high. I wasn't ovulating. There was no name for what I was experiencing, and no way to fix it. Things looked hopeless. Would I ever be able to conceive a child? Would I ever have the family I had always dreamed of?
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