Healthy Me

I said I'd tell about my illness so here goes...

I was hospitalized due to a really bad case of Pelvic Inflammatory Disease (due to bacterial vaginosis...NOT a sexually transmitted disease which the doctors would not believe until the cultures came back proving neither myself nor my husband cheated on each other and gave each other a disease!). The doctors actually ticked both my husband and myself off with their disbelief that one of us must have had multiple partners which one of us got an STD from and that's what gave me PID.  The tests they did proved otherwise but it took a couple days for those tests to come back. We've been faithful to each other for 15 years and having that questioned was irritating!  I'm glad I had my cell phone with me because I was able to learn more about PID and the antibiotics they were giving me on the Internet through my phone. Thank the gods for technology because the doctor was driving me batty!

I was really sick with high fever and extreme pain with the possibility of abcessing. They gave me morphine in the ER for pain, then dilaudid (I think that's how it's spelled) once admitted, then Percocet as the pain went down. Apparently, the flu I thought I had with fever for four days a few weeks ago was the start of the infection raging through my reproductive organs until they were screaming at me to get to the hospital.

Unfortunately, the antibiotics (Gentamicin and Clindamycin) they had me on had such bad side effects (dizziness, nausea, ear pain and hallucinations) that I was happy to get off them after 2-1/2 days when I got sent home. Those side effects lingered for several days after but they eventually worked their way out of my system thankfully. I think it was the Gentamicin that did all that to me. The faces flying at me in my head were bad enough (and the evil grins some of the faces gave me were downright scary) but when the Virgin Mary statue outside my hospital window turned and looked at me several times, I rang for the nurse to get me off the medications!

So that's some of what happened.  There's more to chat about (the CT scan results) but I'll do that later. 

I finished reading Thyroid Solution: A Mind-Body Program for Beating Depression & Regaining Your Emotional & Physical Health. It had some good points in it but I am glad I didn't buy it since there is a newer copy out called The Thyroid Solution: A Revolutionary Mind-Body Program for Regaining Your Emotional and Physical Health which I would rather have on my bookshelf.

I'll go on with some important notes that I made on the rest of the book (to see my notes from the beginning of this book, click here):

• After your thyroid levels are brought within normal range, you still should exercise and eat right. I need to do this more myself.

• Thyroid & Sexual Health: Hypothyroidism can lead to lack of interest in sex, which may decline a bit or vanish completely. If you have never been tested for thyroid imbalance and are exhibiting loss of interest and your gynecologist can't figure it out, have your blood drawn. It's as simple as that to rule out your thyroid being the problem in the bedroom. I am thankful this hasn't been a problem for me or maybe because I was a bit oversexed to begin with, it just brought me down to a more normal sex drive, lol. If you have the opposite problem - a raging libido - could be hyperthyroid. Get a blood test! Dr. Arem suggests that if you are still having problems after your hypothyroidism is fixed, to consider a T4/T3 combination (which can also help with persistent depression).

• Your Thyroid & Infertility/Miscarriage: Having an overactive or underactive thyroid can make it hard to conceive and it may be overlooked. The book talks of couples going through years of infertility treatments (and debt) only to find out it was as simple as a blood test to check thyroid levels! This was a big one for us. Despite having four kids, three out of those four children were difficult to conceive. It took about a year for our first child to be conceived. It took over a year for my son to be conceived. My third child was conceived the first month after we decided to try for a third child (during a big fight with my husband's sister...husband was being loving and consoling me and voila! A baby!) It was after this third child that I developed thyroid disease though I do wonder if my thyroid levels had been off just enough prior to diagnosis to cause problems conceiving my oldest two children. After diagnosis, it took almost two years for my last child to be conceived...the doctor was getting ready to give me infertility treatments when I finally got pregnant before he was to do that.