Medical dilemmas....part 1

I have an interesting medical history that always seems to make Doctors salivate with a kind of awe.  They seem to be amazed that I am still alive actually sitting there in their office and slightly nervous that I may actually keel over while I am sitting there.  I think that intellectually I am a bit more interesting than the regular offering who walks through the door, but it isn't long before they tire of me as I have not performed any new amazing near death experiences for them.

I have had doctors tell me all sorts of things over the years, like I'll be pretty much infertile after 30, so will have to have all my children in my 20's.  I am only alive because of the wonders of medicine, and most recently, I had a specialist tell me that I should not really have even made it through my mum's pregnancy, I am lucky to be here at all.

Well at 44 and having had 4 children, two of them after I turned 30, I guess I am doing pretty well.

Around about the middle of primary school, I went from being one of the biggest kids in the class, height wise, to being one of the chubbiest too. 

Kindy I am wearing a red cardigan

This continued until I hit my puberty growth spurt in High school and I dropped the weight whilst gaining height.  That gave me a few good teenage years where I wasn't exactly wrapped in my body, I wasn't totally disgusted either. Oh I wish I had that body now, why did I spend so much wasted time thinking that I was fat?

AS you can see from the school piccies I was relatively similar in size to the other kids in my class, until around year three when the

year1 up the back in the brown cardigan, year 2 RHS of teacher

chubbing up became much more noticeable.  Then the next few photos are individual ones of me that track me through the remainder of primary school and into high school. I'm guessing I was biggest in year 6, I think I remember wearing size 16 women's clothes.  By the end of year 7 I had lost most of my weight and although I was 10cm taller I was down to between a size 10 and size 12.  Those glorious hormones, it all pretty much happened by itself.  But being a teenager, I got into the whole dieting thing and like most teenage girls of my era, I was often on some sort of a diet or another.

The most successful diet was one where I decided that soup was the go and that I would go and swim laps.  I had been given a beautiful formal dress that I wanted to wear to my year 12 formal.  When I first tried it on, I

year 3 next to teacher 2nd front row

was inches away from getting it zipped up at the back.  By my formal, though I had lost the required amount of weight and was able to fit into it.  I was so proud of myself.
It was about this time, the end of my final year at High school, 1987, that I was diagnosed with a malignant melanoma on my abdomen. I had gone to the doctor to have a rather large mole removed from my back.  While I was there I asked him to look at a mole on my front that I had started to scratch at.  He looked at it and decided that it looked fine.  I pressed him to remove it anyway.  A week later I got the results.  It was malignant.
He immediately sent me off to see a specialist in Sydney.  Not really realising the gravity of the situation, after seeing the specialist and being told it was going to cost a bucket load of money to have the area excised and that he wanted me to go straight into hospital for the operation, we (mum, dad and I) declined and returned to Canberra.  Upon learning this the doctor nearly had kittens, and promptly booked me into a surgeon in Canberra and within weeks I was having an operation designed to excise the area surrounding the site of the melanoma.  That turned out all fine.  The melanoma had not spread to the surrounding tissue, and my lymph nodes were clear, so I went onto a watch list, where I would travel to Sydney twice a year to be checked over by the specialists in the Melanoma unit in Royal Prince Alfred Hospital.  I got the all clear and was able to cease visits after my five years.

This also coincided with the time that I started University.  I had my excision operation in the week before lectures started.  So while the others were getting to know each other in various O week activities I was laying in hospital being chopped up.

While at University two notable doctor's visits had me diagnosed with flat feet (so jogging for sport was ruled out) and polycystic ovary syndrome.  This was the first time that I was told that I would have to have children in my twenties, as conception would be difficult if I left child rearing too long.  Being about 19 at this stage, having children was the furtherest thing from my mind.  In fact I am pretty sure at that age  I had declared that I was never going to have any children.  So I again down played the whole polycystic ovary thing and put it on the back burner.

Not long after finishing University, I would have been around 22 by this stage, I went to the doctor about a minor matter.  This doctor was far more interested in the state of my throat.  I wasn't quite sure why she was taking such an unusual interest in my neck.  She told me ( I had never noticed this before) that I had a goitre.  After blood tests and an ultrasound of the offending area, I was diagnosed with hashimotos thyroiditis.  I had never heard of this before, but upon investigation found out that it was an autoimmune disease where the thyroid starts to grow and produce less thyroid hormone.  I was duly prescribed thyroxin for the condition and told that I would need regular blood tests to measure my thyroid levels and have my dose adjusted accordingly.  I stayed on thyroxin until just after the birth of my first child in 1996.

All was going along fine for the next few years.  I met a bloke and fell in love and we became vegetarians after reading Fit For Life.  I turned 25 and then not long after developed a pain in my calf.  The pain increased to the point where I was worried that I had burst a blood vessel.  I went to the doctor and described the pain.  She told me that I wouldn't have burst a blood vessel, but I could quite possibly have a blood clot, a deep vein thrombosis, or DVT.  I was sent off for tests that confirmed it.  This was a very strange thing for a 25 year old girl to suffer.  This was something that normally happened to old people.  Oh well, we medicated me with heparin, followed by warfarin and got the  thing fixed.  Then we just wrote it off as some weird anomaly and I got on with life.

Not long after I had finished treatment I fell pregnant with my first child and soon there after I married the perpetrator. Following the birth I was taking a low dose aspirin as I had been made aware of the increased risk factors of suffering blood clots due to pregnancy hormones.  I was living in Bombala at the time and the local pharmacist was not happy that I was taking aspirin and breastfeeding.  He strongly advised me to stop the aspirin.  I did. And sure enough I developed DVT number two.  At first the doctor ( a different one to the one I had before) would not believe me.  I announced that I thought that I had a blood clot and he disparagingly said to me, oh you're a nurse are you?  I quickly informed him that it was not that long ago that I had had one and that I knew exactly what they felt like.  He sent me home with a swat behind the ear telling me that it was just fluid on the knee.  Two days later I rang him and told him I was in great pain and was barely able to walk.  He told me to go and check myself into hospital.

With a 6 week old baby in her capsule I drove my self to hospital and then hobbled my way up to admission to check myself into hospital.  The pain got a whole lot worse before it got better, but with heparin and warfarin I was again returned to free flowing blood again.  Bombala hospital was mainly a geriatric hospital, so the presence of a new mum with her 6 week old baby was a boon for the staff.  Unfortunately they had no idea how to feed a starving lactating mum, so Steve had to smuggle food in for me.

It was during the time that I was completing my course of warfarin medication and slowly reducing my doses, that I decided to do the same with my thyroxin.  I kind of wondered if it may have had something to do with me getting these blood clots.  I wasn't a big fan of the idea of being medicated all the time, so I decided to ditch the thyroxin along with the warfarin.

That little experiment didn't work.  Less than two years later I found myself pregnant with baby number two and felt another blood clot developing.  By this time we were living near Oberon, so I was faced with another new doctor unaware of my medical history.  I also noticed that far from having to try too hard with my supposed polycystic ovaries, I was managing to get myself pregnant rather easily.  I went to the doctor with my suspicions of my impending clot to be faced with a similar situation as before.  Doctors do not like you walking into their offices with a pre- self made diagnosis.  This failure of the doctor to believe me left me with three dilemmas. Firstly, I didn't want to develop the full blown clot.  They hurt a whole lot and I now had a toddler who needed looking after, I couldn't just nick off to hospital. Secondly, we were planning on travelling overseas very shortly and long haul flights are notorious for causing DVT's.  Thirdly, in order for the doctor to confirm my diagnosis I was told to go and have an x-ray with radio active dye injected into my veins.  I was PREGNANT, there was no way that I was going to go and do THAT.

So what did I do?  I left the doctor's surgery and crossed the road to  the chemist.  I bought a box of aspirin, went home, had a glass of red wine and a couple of aspros. Over the ensuing couple of days I had a full dose of aspirin three times a day. And guess what?  I cleared it.  Maybe it was not the most responsible thing for a pregnant woman to do, but it seemed a hell of a better option than pumping radioactive dye into my veins.

And that my folks is the end of part 1.  Stay tuned for part two.