My Life with PCOS

September is PCOS Awareness Month, so I thought I would take this opportunity to talk a little about my life with PCOS. First, let's start off with answering the question: What is PCOS?

Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome (PCOS) is a genetic, hormonal, metabolic, and reproductive disorder that effects women. PCOS has many different symptoms, which makes it difficult to diagnose, and every woman is affected differently by it. An estimated 1 in 10 women in the United States has been diagnosed or will be diagnosed with PCOS.

I am 1 in 10. I was diagnosed with PCOS when I was 23. This was after nearly a decade of living with and suffering from the symptoms and no one being able to tell me why. When I was 16 I gained weight very quickly, seemingly out of the blue. A doctor did diagnose me with hypothyroidism, while at the same time telling me I was probably just lazy and needed to exercise more. What that doctor didn't know is that I had barely been eating and had been exercising every single day since I had started gaining weight.

I would spend the next seven years seeing doctor after doctor and hearing the same things. "You need to exercise more." "You should try this diet, it will help." "You just need to be more active and watch what you eat." I tried Weight Watchers, multiple times. I journaled every single thing I ate. I exercised like mad. I even got to the point of considering starving myself just to lose a little bit of weight because I was so miserable.

It wasn't just the weight gain, however. I was tired all the time. I was emotional, I had these irrational mood swings. I had aches and pains almost constantly. I had been unable to get pregnant. When I got my period, it was like being run over by a truck. No one, no doctor, could tell me why I felt this way. They just told me that if I took my thyroid medication and lost weight I would feel better. Guess what? I didn't feel better. Not only did I find it impossible to lose weight, I just kept gaining it. The other symptoms continued to get worse, and I began to hate myself a little bit more.

Finally when I was 23 I went to see a gynecologist for a routine yearly exam. He took one look at my chart and said those magical words, "You've got PCOS." I had heard of PCOS, kind of, as my aunt had been diagnosed a few years before. But, I didn't really understand what that meant. He explained it to me, mostly. And he immediately put me on Metformin. Within weeks of taking the Metformin, I started to lose weight. It didn't help with all the other symptoms, I wouldn't find a way to help with those for awhile longer. But, as I began to lose weight, I began to feel better overall.

Years later I would discover that birth control is one of the best ways to control many of the other PCOS symptoms I had been dealing with, as they are caused by hormonal imbalances. So, I chose to get Mirena, and many of the symptoms have been lessened a great deal since then. I also came to terms with the fact that I would probably never get pregnant. I actually embraced that idea, which is a story for another post.

I am now in my 30s, it's been about 10 years since I was diagnosed with PCOS. The past decade has been full of ups and downs. I've lost weight, I've gained it back, and now I've lost it again. I've actually come close to hitting my goal of losing 100lbs now. It's hard because people always ask, "how did you do it?" The reality is, I can talk about portion control and exercise, but I don't know exactly how I've done it. Something in the past two years just clicked and I lost the weight.

Don't get me wrong, I still have flare days. I have days where I'm so exhausted and fatigued that I can barely function, and all I want to do is curl up in bed all day. I have mornings where I wake up achy and hurting from head to toe. I have times where I am totally fine one minute and then the next I'm weeping for no reason. I have days were that fiery ball of rage burns in my stomach. Flare days are still a very real part of my life, and they always will be.

I never know how I'm going to wake up feeling. I never know what any given day is going to bring me. But, I fight through, I still live my life. I listen to my body at the same time, though. When I have days that I'm too fatigued to function, I rest. When I have days when my body hurts so much that it feels like I've been run over, I rest. It's not always easy to rest, I constantly feel like I should be doing something on those days, but I know it will only get worse if I don't take the time to do so. I have to allow myself the time to rest, the time to cry, the time to let the symptoms have their way. I know if I do, tomorrow will be better.

I am 1 in 10 women with PCOS. I live with it every single day. There is no cure. They don't even truly know what causes it. I can lessen some of the symptoms, but the reality is, they never go away. I will probably live with this the rest of my life. It's a part of who I am. But, I refuse to let it control me. I refuse to allow it to keep me from living my life to fullest I can possibly live it. I have PCOS, it's one piece of who I am, it does not define who I am.

This is the face of PCOS. What you don't see is the constant war waging inside my body.