I'm starting in the middle of my treatment because of a couple of several things: I wasn't actually diagnosed with endometriosis definitively until last May, and it hadn't really occurred to me until recently that it might be helpful to other women going through some of the same things I have to know they are not alone, and a blog would be a way to share my experiences.
Exactly a week ago I received the Depot Lupron shot, and a prescription for a progesterin supplement to help combat some of the side effects of the shot. The shot will shut down my reproductive organs for 6 months, hopefully giving them a chance to heal themselves, but also causing me to go into menopause during this time. There are two varieties of the shot-one you get every month, and one which lasts three months. I received the three month one, and will be going back in April for the next one. Right after I got the shot I felt a little light headed, but that passed within the hour after I got it. I had some soreness around the injection site for two days, which is injected into the area above your butt cheek (where those love handles we hate kind of wrap around to), for about two days after. It didn't really hurt to to get the shot-it was the same as getting a shot anywhere else. It was a bit of a shock though, because I was expecting one in the arm.
So far the only real side effects that I have noticed are feeling slightly warmer than normal (I don't think I'd call it a full blown hot flash, and it could be psychosomatic as easily as real), and really strange dreams at night. I remember them pretty well, and they are vivid and pretty bizarre (even for my standards and I tend to have some weird dreams anyway)- I have been taking the hormone supplement right before bed time, because that is when I used to take my birth control pill, and I think I'm going to try moving up the time I take it to earlier and see if that helps to decrease the weird dreams. I've also been really tired lately, and napping a lot when I don't have anything to do. I'm not sure that this is a side effect of the medicine though-more likely it's just because I'm on winter break from school right now, and I had a pretty strenuous semester last semester, so I'm enjoying some down time.
The Back Story: The short version will have to do for now, I might go into more detail at a later time. I started my period when I was ten, and had pretty light, three day periods, with only occasional mild cramps (the period from heaven, right!). My sophomore year in high school, when I was 16, I started having really bad cramps and missed school because of the severity of them. Midol/Tylenol/Motrin didn't help much at all. My period also got longer and heavier-I often had chunks of stuff come out instead of a normal flow. I finally convinced my mother that I was experiencing enough problems that I needed to go to the gynecologyst when I was 17. That doctor put me on birth control. It helped a little, and I then moved around a bit and went to several more doctors because my condition kept getting worse. One woman didn't believe me, another doctor down-played the situation, and finally I found another doctor who would work with me. She changed my birth control several times over the next year or so, seeing if the different hormone levels would work better for me. I never noticed a change in my symptoms, except for one instance when I was given the generic Ortho Tri Cyclin Low when it first came out, which didn't work at all for me and my symptoms were terrible. She also ordered a pelvic ultrasound for me to check for cysts. They didn't find anything with the ultra sound, and the procedure was no big deal really. They just did an ultrasound on the outside of my stomach, and then with a wand did one from inside my vaginal cavity. She also prescribed a series of different anti-inflammatory, none of which helped to decrease my pain, even when I started them a day or two before my pain actually started. One of the symptoms I developed with my periods as time has gone on is migraines, and Celebrex made them worse, so I stopped taking that immediately. I also get nausea and pain that lasts from two days before my period to to or three days after I start it (this gradually increased over the years as my symptoms worsened and my period got longer).
In May of last year I had a laproscopy done, and some endometriosis removed from the outside of the uterus. I was very hopeful that this would help, at least to some degree, but it did not lessen my symptoms, which brings me to now, and the shot. The laproscopy was a pretty easy surgery-I was back to work in a week, and only need the pain meds for the first couple of days. The only thing that was a little different from normal was that since my appendix exploded when I was a kid, instead of going in through my bellybutton as they normally do, they made two incisions, one slightly higher than my navel and in the middle of my left side, and one about five inches below my bellybutton.
For the past two years or so I have been taking birth control for three months without the sugar/placebo/reminder pills (so I only have about 4 periods a year), which doesn't seem to help much other than keeping me symptom free during the time in between. I occationally have some cramping and pain like I do with my period in the the months between, but milder than the sympoms with my period. I tried to do up to six months this way, but at the fourth month I was having the same kind of pain, and spotting that lasted longer than it would with my period normally. I guess that's the summary for now. Feel free to ask any questions, no matter how personal, and I'll answer them the best I can. I also am planning to add links to resources/groups you can join/etc. as I find them on the web.
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