Who woulda thunk it-Physical Therapy helps??!!!!

I've been attending physical therapy for a few months now, and I can't believe the difference it's making!  I just finished a period that was only three days long (which is probably b/c of Yaz and the fact that I just had one a month ago-highly unusual for me, but the hubby is finally coming home to me in a couple weeks, so gotta have max pain free time once he gets back!!), and only pain for two days!!!  I can't remember the last time I was so lucky!!!  Well, I know luck has nothing to do with it really.  I've been doing exercises to help stretch the abdomen, which strangely seem to help.  They were all recommended by my p.t. but a lot of them were yoga poses-child's pose, cobra, upward dog, the half wheel or whatever you call the deal that leads for people who can do it into a backbend (who the hell can do that after they pass the age of ten anyway?  Besides the people on my fav Indie Yoga DVD anyway).  Those and several pelvic tilt exercises, paired with my TENS unit, and I'm a pretty happy camper!

Eight months and counting

It's been that long since I've had a real period, although I've had some intermittent spotting and the likes. But I'm still having symptoms. Thursday night I went to bed early with a headache I was afraid was going to turn into a migrain (which I usually only get in association with my peroid). I woke up with it and had it all day Friday. I ended up going to bed a bit early, and staying in bed for several hours after I woke up this morning in order to make sure it didn't come back. I had some cramping and discomfort too, which seems to always get worse with moving around. I've felt pretty blah the last few days. Ever since I got back from Illinois. I don't feel like doing anything. I've been sitting around the apartment, reading and watching DVD's with no interest in the outside world. I did cook dinner tonight, which turned out pretty tasty. I am proud of myself, because I didn't use a recipe, I just threw some things together. There are so many things that I should be doing that I just don't have the energy for though: I need to blanch and put up to freeze the corn and beans my mother-in-law gave me. I need to write a letter to the people who gave me a scholarship. I haven't even managed to put real clothes on all day. I hope Katy gets back soon--she keeps me from falling into slumps like this to some extent. Does anyone else ever this kind of depression in conjunction with your endo???

Off the Menopause

I'm finally off the depo lupron. That's somewhat of a blessing. I had stopped taking the Progesterone supplement (against my doctor's orders) because it was making me crazy and have night sweats, hot flashes, all the things it was suppose to help prevent, so I wasn't dealing with too many side effects by the end of the treatment in those ways. The one problem I did experience was breakthrough bleeding...I was up to having a light but painful period every two weeks. I'm back on Yaz now, which seems to help as far as my insane water weight that I gained on the depo, and my skin is starting to clear up a bit too. Nothing major really happened, I could just tell it was a little more breakout prone. I was never on the pill for acne treatment, but is a nice benefit.

My hubby is deployed again...he left in the wee hours of the morning April 30th. I was blessed enough (thank the goddess) to see him for four glorious although much to short days in May before he was shipped overseas. I've been pretty depressed the last few days. I'm not sure if it's the fact that I'm almost done with my first pack of pills, and it is therefore just about period time (although I'm going to skip these next three or four if at all possible-the fewer periods the better). I have been having cramps, back aches (which may be related to my new job and not a period symptom...but as I've discovered, you just never know what pain goes with what problem when you've got this disease. There's a new symptom around every corner it seems) and pretty severe lack of energy. I called off work Tuesday morning because I couldn't manage to drag myself out of bed, and I was achy and feeling the beginning of a migraine growing. I slept twelve hours Sunday night, and that much again all together Monday night after sleeping until noon on Tuesday.

Does anyone read this? I'm just wondering if I'm reaching anyone at all. The whole reason I started this was to help other people. Sometimes it seems pretty lonely, like I'm the only one living with this. It's not like breast cancer, or AIDS, it's not on the public radar. I'm going to do my best to change that though.

And the menopause goes on

I got my second shot at the beginning of April. Since my firs post when I noticed the break through bleeding and cramping, I have had that every month (pretty much instead of a period). The bleeding has gotten increasingly heavier each month until today I've pretty much had two days of light period. I asked my doctor when I went for the shot in April if this was normal (and if this was really going to help if my body wasn't shutting down like it should), and he only had some vague "Well, lets just see what happens" answer. So I'm just trying to be as patient as I can. And I'm hoping for the best. I hope this really does help me. But I'm a bit sceptical since it doesn't even have the desired effect of stopping my period completely. Has anyone else had this problem??? Sometimes I wonder if I'm the only one that has to deal with this stuff. There's no Oprah special on endo (at least not that I know of). We should get together and do something about spreading awareness. Maye we'd have better treatment and diagnosis then. Or at least more viable options.

My side effects have been pretty much the same-a rare mood swing, lots of hot flashes, a bit of night sweats, but nothing that wakes me up (usually the hubby just remarks in the morning that sleeping next to me was like cuddling with a furnace). And the breakthrough bleeding/cramping. I stopped taking the progesterone supplement (bad me, I know), which seems to have cut down on the crazy dreams and even some of the hot flashes. I'm trying to take it every day again now recently because the doc said to.

Anyway, my hubby just deployed a few weeks ago, so I'm trying to keep busy. I'll probably be posting more now that I only have one summer class to keep me busy (plus whatever other things I can find to keep me occupied and distracted). I need to keep doing stuff so that the time doesn't drag on. It's so much harder going through all these crazy problems without him by my side. He's such a great supporter of me.

Anyway, I'm off to search the web for info (or possibly get distracted looking at knitting and crocheting patterns).

So far...

I have had occational hot flashes, and strange sometimes frightening dreams nightly, but other than that no severe side effects. I tried changing the time I take my progesterone supplement, but it doesn't seem to change the weird dreams. I just started breakthrough bleeding with some cramping-I don't know if this is normal or not this far into the shot? I had surgery (unrelated to endo) on Thursdsay, and I don't know if the anesthesia could have caused it? I'm searching the net to see if I can find some answers.

Here's a link I found which doesn't help my question, but may be of interest:
http://www.medications.com/effect/tag/depo%20lupron
http://www.askapatient.com/viewrating.asp?drug=19732&name=LUPRON%20DEPOT (this seems like a lot of complaints, but many of those taking the drug say the side efffects are worth it)
http://community.livejournal.com/endometriosis/tag/argh!! (looks like a potential place to connect to others with Endo)

Phase 3 of Treatment

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.