Jane, stop this crazy thing!
Jul. 21st, 2015 15:58![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
torquillYesterday I crashed in the late morning and took a nap. I felt fantastic when I woke up around 1:30 in the afternoon -- I was alert, my head was clear, I wasn't queasy or cramping anymore, I no longer felt huge and clumsy, and I had all the energy I've been lacking for weeks. I was in a great mood, and continued to feel amazing all the way up to when I went to bed a little after midnight.
I woke up this morning at 9, took a shower, and went straight back to bed. I woke up for a phone call at 11:30, then went on to sleep until 1. I got up feeling like I was wrapped in cotton. By now, 4pm, I'm starting to feel really sleepy again.
What happened between feeling fabulous and now? I took my birth control pill -- the low-dose one -- at about midnight, 36 hours after the previous one. My best guess is that falling estrogen levels within a certain range make me really sleepy. For what it's worth, it's not restless dozing -- if I go to bed, I sleep like a rock. I just sleep a LOT.
I don't want to drop off the pills yet, but the situation really is worsening. If it takes 24 hours for me to get my energy back, I'm going to be spending a lot of time fogged out or sleeping. I could drop to a half-pill at night... it turns out that even half of one of the low-dose pills is still about five times the estrogen delivered in one day by NuvaRing, so it's possible that it would be in whatever window there is between non-functional and bleeding-like-mad.
The next queer play party is on the 31st. I hope, I really do, that I can attend that just before everything hits the fan while I'm weaning off the pill. A little bit of spotting probably won't be bad, and it took a week of being off the low-dose pill last time before I started bleeding horribly.
I just want to be off this rollercoaster. I also want to know what the hell is driving it -- if I'm producing more estrogen all the time, what's causing that? My weight has been stable since at least April, so it's not additional fat... my suspicions are aimed at my ovaries, which might be ramping up before they go poof, but then again I wonder whether an ovarian tumor could have the same effect. The ultrasound didn't show anything weird about the ovaries, but I'm not sure they got great resolution with it (since I hadn't followed the protocol, not having been given the instructions). Something to ask about.
I hate taking the pills now. It's like chemo, knowing that they'll make you sick but you can't *not* take them without serious consequences. At least the bleeding won't kill me, but that doesn't make it any easier to take pills knowing that I'm going to be queasy, depressed, brainfogged, and tired as all hell once they take effect.
I can't wait for Thursday. Meanwhile, I'll see whether I can finesse this dosage to give me a little more time like I had yesterday... I kept reminding myself that *that* was normal, the rest was just crap. I will get back to my normal, where everything is so much easier and life is good. It's just a matter of waiting it out.
One interesting facet of the symptoms: not only do I get depressed and tired, I get muscle fatigue, short of breath, and clumsy. It all combines to make me feel horribly fat and unattractive. Yet when the fog lifts, that goes away -- I'm still carrying 35 extra, but they don't *matter*. I'm strong, I feel agile and reasonably fit, I have energy that makes the extra weight irrelevant. And I feel attractive again. I have to remind myself repeatedly, while I'm in the fog, that I'm not feeling awful because I'm fat. I feel fat because I feel awful. It's an artifact, nothing more; a symptom of the hormone imbalance. My weight isn't the source of any of this problem, and therefore focusing on it just diverts my attention from the real solutions.
Depression makes it hard to believe stuff like that, but I can try.
I'm taking it easy today. I'll try to run a couple of essential errands, but not push myself. We'll see how I feel tonight and tomorrow morning.
I woke up this morning at 9, took a shower, and went straight back to bed. I woke up for a phone call at 11:30, then went on to sleep until 1. I got up feeling like I was wrapped in cotton. By now, 4pm, I'm starting to feel really sleepy again.
What happened between feeling fabulous and now? I took my birth control pill -- the low-dose one -- at about midnight, 36 hours after the previous one. My best guess is that falling estrogen levels within a certain range make me really sleepy. For what it's worth, it's not restless dozing -- if I go to bed, I sleep like a rock. I just sleep a LOT.
I don't want to drop off the pills yet, but the situation really is worsening. If it takes 24 hours for me to get my energy back, I'm going to be spending a lot of time fogged out or sleeping. I could drop to a half-pill at night... it turns out that even half of one of the low-dose pills is still about five times the estrogen delivered in one day by NuvaRing, so it's possible that it would be in whatever window there is between non-functional and bleeding-like-mad.
The next queer play party is on the 31st. I hope, I really do, that I can attend that just before everything hits the fan while I'm weaning off the pill. A little bit of spotting probably won't be bad, and it took a week of being off the low-dose pill last time before I started bleeding horribly.
I just want to be off this rollercoaster. I also want to know what the hell is driving it -- if I'm producing more estrogen all the time, what's causing that? My weight has been stable since at least April, so it's not additional fat... my suspicions are aimed at my ovaries, which might be ramping up before they go poof, but then again I wonder whether an ovarian tumor could have the same effect. The ultrasound didn't show anything weird about the ovaries, but I'm not sure they got great resolution with it (since I hadn't followed the protocol, not having been given the instructions). Something to ask about.
I hate taking the pills now. It's like chemo, knowing that they'll make you sick but you can't *not* take them without serious consequences. At least the bleeding won't kill me, but that doesn't make it any easier to take pills knowing that I'm going to be queasy, depressed, brainfogged, and tired as all hell once they take effect.
I can't wait for Thursday. Meanwhile, I'll see whether I can finesse this dosage to give me a little more time like I had yesterday... I kept reminding myself that *that* was normal, the rest was just crap. I will get back to my normal, where everything is so much easier and life is good. It's just a matter of waiting it out.
One interesting facet of the symptoms: not only do I get depressed and tired, I get muscle fatigue, short of breath, and clumsy. It all combines to make me feel horribly fat and unattractive. Yet when the fog lifts, that goes away -- I'm still carrying 35 extra, but they don't *matter*. I'm strong, I feel agile and reasonably fit, I have energy that makes the extra weight irrelevant. And I feel attractive again. I have to remind myself repeatedly, while I'm in the fog, that I'm not feeling awful because I'm fat. I feel fat because I feel awful. It's an artifact, nothing more; a symptom of the hormone imbalance. My weight isn't the source of any of this problem, and therefore focusing on it just diverts my attention from the real solutions.
Depression makes it hard to believe stuff like that, but I can try.
I'm taking it easy today. I'll try to run a couple of essential errands, but not push myself. We'll see how I feel tonight and tomorrow morning.
