Validation

Wed, 01 Feb 2023 16:32:34 GMT

Yesterday was a... group? for PMDD folks, put on remotely by a women's reproductive center. There was a psychiatrist and a gynecologist.

This is the first time I've heard someone say that a condition that removes 7-8 functional days per month and can cause extreme nonfunction and suicidality can count as serious, and therefore I'd be allowed to have more treatment than "maybe this birth control pill or SRI will help". It's the first time I've heard that my basically zero energy days, where I'm scared I'll die because breathing feels like it takes too much energy, is probably connected (58% of PMDD folks have lethargy as a symptom, and mine is just a little on the more intense side).

In part this means it's the first time I'm able to really admit how bad it is, because part of coping with something is minimizing it. My whole life I've planned around staying away from social contact, making decisions, and important events before my period. Things weren't "that bad" "most of" the time, and I had a lot of compensatory ability the rest of the time.

It's kind of like autism, though: the realization isn't entirely that it's bad for me, so much as that many other people have it so so easy in this regard.

Unlike autism this is something with a potential solution, and which I'm not in the least ambivalent about getting rid of. The gynecologist said that in extreme cases that don't respond to anything else, there's a drug that shuts down the ovaries for six months as a test, with a little bit of hormone supplementation to keep osteoporosis etc at bay. If that works, the ovaries can come out. This is after trying various birth control, psych meds, etc, but-- her examples of extreme cases are my everyday life.

It's also a reminder to me that I'm 21 days into my second type of birth control pill and things are pretty bad; they say after 3 months if it hasn't helped it probably won't, but I think this is not helping. It's put me at not exactly the bottom of my cycle, but pretty far into the bad stuff range. I'm taking it one day at a time but I miss my life. I miss not having to be so so careful with everything all the time, nd I realize that I've always had to be so careful with everything all the time because I always had to compensate for the bad times.

The clinic that ran the group doesn't take over my care, but they send information sheets to my doctor, and they're available to my doctor for consults on this stuff. I feel like someone has my back?

Fun fact: this isn't a hormonal disease, that is, there isn't a hormonal imbalance. It's an issue with the way the brain processes normal hormones and "normal" hormone fluctuations.

( Some symptoms, content sucks, sui etc )

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Validation