Answers

I’ve been feeling sluggish lately.  And by “lately” I mean for the past two years. 

What?  “Lately” is a relative term.

So I went to my doctor last week and poured my heart out.  It took a lot of courage for me to do that – to ask for help.  The fact that I not only called to make the appointment but actually showed up for it is testament to the fact that I have been feeling especially horrid for the past few weeks.

After calming me down, my doctor took a brief medical history, including asking for details about Blythe’s birth, which seemed, in my mind, to be the catalyst for my downward spiral.

It didn’t take long for him to make an educated guess on my problem: a fairly rare condition called Sheehan’s Syndrome. 

All the pieces fit, the biggest one being that I hemorrhaged after giving birth.  I continued to bleed internally for two weeks, until I gave birth to the softball sized clot keeping all that inside my uterus, (a fun mental picture, no?) and then hemorrhaged again in the operating room, losing an entire liter of blood in one go.  So, blood loss after pregnancy?  That’s a big fat CHECK.*

All the rest of it – the moodiness, the lethargy, the difficulty breast feeding, the feeling cold all the damn time, the depression, the anxiety, the “female issues”, the low metabolism, it all fits, too. 

They’ve drawn my blood to test the levels of my hormones to see how badly my pituitary gland was damaged by lack of oxygen during the blood loss.  From there, I’ll start on hormone replacements and see if we can put Humpty Dumpty back together again.

In the meantime, I’ve been taking an anti-anxiety/anti-depressant (Lexapro, 10mg) for a week now.  While the side effects were a bit daunting to begin with, I think I’m starting to adjust, and beginning to see more and more of my old self – my real self – shining through.  It’s so nice to see her.  I was beginning to think she was lost forever.

The amount of relief I felt when my doctor told me there was most likely a physiological reason for the way I’ve been feeling far outweighed the bad news that I’d have to be on hormone replacements, possibly for the rest of my life.  Here I was, feeling guilty for my depression for two full years, and there was a perfectly logical explanation for it all. 

But, as the days have passed, I’ve begun to wonder how I’ll feel if my blood tests come back ‘normal’.  Will I still feel as good as I’ve begun to feel, or will the guilt start creeping back in? 

For two years, I’ve been angry at myself for feeling resentful of the chaos that is my life, all the while knowing I’m grateful for everything I have.  I don’t want to feel that way anymore.  I want to forgive myself for feeling like life is just effing hard sometimes, regardless of whether my pituitary gland is broken or whole.

So, I wait.  Another week, and I’ll know for sure.  I hope I won’t care about the answer.

* Go here and here if you’d like to read more about that crazy experience.