I live with Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome. Maybe some of you have heard about it, maybe not, but living with it is a lot different than knowing about it. People do not consider it a serious disorder, but it has changed my life significantly. PCOS is a disorder in which your hormones are unbalanced. With me, my body makes too much estrogen and too much testosterone. The disorder changes the way you look, such as facial hair growing, hair growing on your chest. Typically, women with PCOS are usually bigger. Doctors do not really know the cause of PCOS, but they believe that there is a genetic connection. Personally, my weight and health are affected. I wasn't diagnosed with PCOS until I was 17, which caused some complications in my life.
Growing up, I never thought that anything was wrong with me. I was always bigger than the rest of the girls and I never really questioned it. I always had a hard time losing weight, but I always just thought that I wasn't doing it the right way. My undiagnosed PCOS was the cause for my inability to lose weight, but I didn't know that. As high school approached, I just wanted to be small like everyone else. People always talked about my weight or judged me because my weight and I became desperate to lose weight. I started to restrict my food intake to unhealthy amounts and exercised a lot. I still didn't see results. I felt like a failure, to be honest. I started to binge-eat some nights, but told myself I wouldn't do it again.
The summer going into my senior year, I had an ovarian cyst rupture. The pain was indescribable, and my mom rushed me to the hospital. Two injections of liquid morphine was not enough to kill the pain, that's how bad the pain was. That is when the doctor said that she thought that I had PCOS. She did some blood tests to see my hormone and blood levels and that is when I was diagnosed with Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome. I also found out that I was insulin resistant, which is a side effect of undiagnosed PCOS. Insulin resistance is when your body makes insulin, but your body doesn't absorb or process it. Basically, the insulin sits in my body and my levels rise.
I started going to OBGYN specialist to get my PCOS under control. I was put on Metformin, which is a diabetes medicine, but the side effects of the medicine help my PCOS symptoms and insulin resistance. I was put on 1000 mg of it a day by my then specialist. I thought that I was on the road to getting better and overcoming PCOS. Being on Metformin, it affects your blood sugar levels and because I was on so many milligrams a day, my blood sugar levels started bottoming out. I started to feel super tired and dizzy a lot of the day. I just thought that I wasn't getting enough sleep and thought I was fine.
On October 19, 2014, I was hanging out with my friends and getting some food. I dropped them off and I started to feel a really weird pain in my thigh. By the time I got home, it was unbearable and I could barely walk. My parents were on a flight home from Florida, so I just had to wait it out. The pain spread from my thigh, to my hip, to my back. My mom finally got home at 2 a.m. and I made her bring me to the hospital. After a lot of waiting and blood tests, I finally got a sonogram. The woman tried to hide her facial expressions while doing my sonogram, but I had so many pain meds in me I wasn't paying attention. My mom suddenly got worried and I knew something was up. I got wheeled back downstairs and my doctor came in the room. He told me I had a cyst in my ovary that was so big, it had to be considered a mass. It was so big that they couldn't see anything in the sonogram, so they were going into the surgery blind and not knowing what was going to happen. I got wheeled into emergency surgery, which was supposed to be an hour maximum, but turned into an almost four-hour surgery.
That day, they removed a 19 cm mass, my left ovary that had died due to the mass, and my left fallopian tube that had been crushed by the mass. I was on bed rest for two weeks and couldn't even walk by myself. I learned that this was caused by not being on the right medicines that my specialist was responsible for.
I live with the symptoms of PCOS every single day. Metformin makes me sick and I have stomach pain everyday, and I only have half a reproductive system because of PCOS. I live in fear that I will feel that pain again and lose the other half and my ability to have children. I have to go to my specialist and talk to him every few weeks because they have to closely monitor me. PCOS is a serious condition that people don't understand is serious. I live with this every single day of my life. I hope people can read this article and if they have some of these symptoms, they will go out and get tested. Undiagnosed PCOS can lead to diabetes or ovarian cancer. I hope that PCOS gets more attention and research in the future so we can make progress on treating it.
