Medical Rollercoaster

 

For the past month and a half, I have been on a medical roller coaster. In and out of the doctor's office and blood lab so many times I am now a familiar face around MIT Medical. Before anyone gets worried and skips to the end of this post to see if I'm dying, I will tell you that I am fine and in the end I was diagnosed with STRESS.   I don't want sympathy from anyone and I'm not trying to make something small into a big deal by writing a blog post about it. I’m simply writing about this because this blog is supposed to serve 2 purposes: 1) To keep our family and friends from home up to date on what’s going on with us in Boston and 2) To serve as a record of our lives here on this adventure so one day when we’re old we can look back and remember everything we experienced during these 2 crazy years of LGO. 

Back in October I made an appointment for myself to have a physical and have blood taken. I had not been feeling like myself for a while and thought maybe it was the stress of moving, the wedding, etc. But once all of those things were over and I still felt crappy, I thought maybe it was something more than that. So I made an appointment.

When my blood results came back, I was not too surprised to find out that something came back abnormal. The doctor thought I might be developing hypothyroidism, due to high TSH levels. At the time I did not know what TSH was or what hypothyroidism was,  but I knew that the thyroid is not something you want to mess with. After a lot of googling I found out a lot about hypothyroidism and saw that I had a lot of the symptoms and that the only treatment is medication FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIFE. I was very unhappy but tried to put it in perspective. Big deal, so I have to take a pill every day. I should be thankful they didn’t find something much worse in my blood results. As much as I hated the idea of being medicated forever, I knew it wasn't THAT bad. So for the next month I mentally prepared for the hypothyroidism diagnosis.

Fast forward to November 1. My doctor had me come in again to check my levels after a month to see if they were better or worse before jumping too quickly into diagnosing me. More blood sucking occurred and then I was scheduled to go back in exactly a week later to discuss the results with my doctor. When I went to meet with him he had great news! My TSH levels were back to normal and I did NOT in fact have hypothyroidism! Apparently high TSH levels can also be caused by stress. However, this time around, something else came up in the results as a cause for concern- high cortisol levels. 

My doctor explained to me, this can be caused by one of four things- high stress (imagine that), the time of day your blood was taken (as levels change throughout the day), the kidney creating too much cortisol on it's own, OR maybe a TUMOR in the pituitary gland in the brain. WTF?!!! 

So the next day I was back in the blood lab having blood taken for the third time. The lady at the front counter in the lab recognized me. PEOPLE. There are a lot of places I would not want to be recognized due to frequent visits, and the blood lab is definitely one of them.

Three days later, my doctor messages me and says my cortisol levels were still high, so he wants me to (I bet you can't guess) come in for YET ANOTHER blood test after taking some kind of steroid and then meet with an endocrinologist. Again, WTF!!?!? Against my will, I obliged. By this 4th test, the blood lab ladies and I are basically BFFs. The day before I went in for the test, I messaged my doctor and reminded him that my life has been kind of stressful lately- and could he not just assume that these levels were all high from stress? In the past 6 months I've moved to a new city, got married, moved into 2 different apartments, started a new job and have a lot of stress still coming up in the near future. He messaged back that he understood but that this steroid test would tell us if it was just stress or something more serious.

This morning, I had the following message from my doctor in my patient online inbox:

"11/19/2012 8:41 AM

Your response to the dexamethasone suppression study showed entirely normal physiology. The a.m. cortisol was low and the ACTH was low as well. We need not pursue this any further. The elevated cortisol from the prior studies is probably a result of physiological and or psychological stressors as discussed."

Soooo basically I just need to chill out and take more dance classes and bubble baths. The end.