I made a pact with myself that I wouldn’t call and nag my doctor after each subsequent test I took in February. It made sense to go through a whole cycle and get a full picture. Plus, who has time for all that? I’ve been on a mission to view my world through a positive spectrum and not let stress wear on me. Being conscious of that choice has helped.
So has eight hours of sleep a night.
Yesterday I finally connected with my doctor’s office – we’d been playing phone tag all week – and got the results.
Day 3 bloodwork: FSH, LH and Estradiol are all normal. No worries there. These tests check your baseline hormones.
HSG (aka Test of Death): Fine. My parts are functioning normally. Turns out all of that pain was just pain. What joy!
Day 23 bloodwork: Progesterone levels, the ones that indicate if you’re ovulating normally, are abysmal. At that stage in the game, your levels should be around 10. Mine came in at a 1.4. It’s possible we missed the window, what with all of that running and training and period skipping that screwed up my cycle, so we’re trying again next (this) month with the Day 23 bloodwork.
The result was as I expected, of course. You can’t know as much about my endocrine system as I do and not be very aware of how its inability to function will impact my fertility. I really don’t think I missed my window since I was taking OPKs and charting for a good five months before I brought this up with my doctor. Never once did I come up with a positive OPK. Stupid thyroid.
Not surprisingly, I’m opting to skip more high-intensity exercise, so boot camp is out. I’m limited to walking and yoga at this point if I hope to keep my body on track. I spent this week focusing on a low-carb diet, mostly because all of the carbs I’d been eating directly before and after the race made me bloated and the rest because I took this week off to rest and heal and my body doesn’t process carbs well if I’m not also exercising. All this is to say I’ll stick to the low-carb diet – nothing particularly restrictive, you understand. Just making sure the majority of my meals are filled proteins and vegetables, little to no dairy, oats and whole grains every once in a while and fruit. I’d like to make sure my weight doesn’t balloon further out of hand.
I also called a place here in Chicago that specializes in holistic approaches to fertility, though charmingly enough it’s an arm of one of the area’s biggest fertility clinics. I mean, God bless ’em for trying. Anyway, I’ll start acupuncture treatments this month, too. Right now it feels like I’m going through a bunch of things against the wall to see what sticks until we get the next round of results in. From there we’ll meet with a specialist and decide what to do next.
I’m feeling rather practical about it all. There isn’t much I can do about these things, after all. It just is what it is. Thank God I don’t have to have another HSG though. Yeesh.
