More girl stuff

[Copied from my first blog, A Nickel for My Thoughts]


So I just talked to my gynecologist today, and after all the tests she's done, she said that some of my hormones were on the low normal side, and that her diagnosis is hypothalamic amenorrhea. Probably induced by weight loss / too much exercise. Which is, I guess, what I suspected. But it sucks. I *like* exercising. I don't want to stop. I'm going to go and see a nutritionist to get a complete workup done, a real bodyfat test and all that. Also a reproductive endocrinologist.

Of course, since I talked to my doc I haven't gotten any work done, I've been researching this on the web and just faffing. No motivation. I did find out that the hormone leptin probably has something to do with all this - there's an article in the NEJM from September that basically says that supplementation with leptin, without any change in exercise / body weight, was able to correct the amenorrhea in some women... of course it was a tiny study (8 patients, 6 controls), so who knows what the real truth is. And one can take injections of gonadotropins to cause ovulation, for the purposes of getting pregnant... but there's a pretty good chance of multiples with that, which scares me. So I don't know where I want to go from here. Try eating a bit more and cutting out some exercise (I'd probably start by quitting volleyball and only going to hockey 2-3 times a week rather than 4-5)? Then comes the question of whether I'm willing to wait 6months + to get things back to normal. I'm usually pretty good with delayed gratification, but not when it interferes with my PLAN.

I've basically had my entire life planned out years in advance, and to this point everything has gone exactly as I've envisioned. In my head, I was going to graduate school, graduate in 5 years (missed the deadline to actually walk by 2 months, but defended my thesis a month before my five year anniversary at grad school), get a job, and after ~3 months, work on getting pregnant. I wanted to go off the pill back in Jan, given that my doc had said it could take up to three months for my cycle to get regular again. I didn't 'cause M- didn't want me to... much tougher to get a job while already pg. So I waited, and went off just before I defended. And so now of course I'm having all these issues. Super annoying.

I figured maybe if I wrote all this down and got it out of my system I'd be able to actually get some work done today. We'll see...