I'm not usually one to go to a doctor for...well, anything I can possibly avoid. I often feel guilty going to a doctor because I figure there has to be someone in more need of this doctor's time than me. Unless my life is being significantly impaired -- i.e., my leg has fallen off and needs reattaching -- I don't need a doctor.

That said, there are some strange things occuring these days that have prompted me to talk to my endocrinologist.

Why am I seeing an endocrinologist? Glad you asked.

It started a few years ago back in California. When Len and I decided to put the fate of our status as parents in the hands of Mother Nature, we really kind of expected it to actually happen at some point. When it didn't, I saw my doctor. She found out that I had elevated levels of prolactin in my body that was keeping me from getting pregnant. She sent me to an endocrinologist to follow up.

He found that I have a prolactinoma, a small growth on my pituitary gland that causes the extra hormone secretion. He said he also found that I have an enlarged thyroid on the right side, and something called Hashimoto's Thyroiditis, an auto-immune disorder that causes my body to think of my thyroid as something to be targetted for destruction, so it creates antibodies to work against it. The level of antibodies has to be monitored regularly because at some point they may become great enough to actually begin destroying my thyroid, at which point I'll need to go on sythetic thyroid medication.

I had never heard of Hashimoto's before, so I looked it up. Now, both the beauty and the curse of the Internet is that it can arm you with more knowledge about something than you're prepared to handle. But I know that, and so I really did try to filter for only truly informative, legitimate links.

What I learned was that Hashimoto's is the most common cause of hypothyroidism. I then looked up hypothyroidism and found out that it's a situation where your thyroid is underfunctioning, which can lead to a bunch of things including weight gain, dry and brittle skin and hair, inability to concentrate, and fatigue. The strangest of these symptoms was that the outer eyebrows can either be really dry or lose their hair.

Suddenly the light went on for me. For years Len had made fun of my "rogue eyebrow"; the outer part of my right eyebrow was in a continuous state of flaking and hair loss. The weight gain suddenly clicked as well -- while trying to lose weight to get into the National Guard years before, I'd been unable to get down to what should have been a normal weight for me without working out two hours every morning and nearly starving myself to death. My skin and hair, since I was in my late teens, had been unusually dry -- despite moisturizer my shins literally looked like someone put talcum powder on them (it wasn't -- it was just a gross display of my dry skin), and my hair was constantly brittle and breaking despite good hair products. Maybe the Hashimoto's I'd just been diagnosed with had always been the cause of these things.

On the next doctor's visit I told him how I was actually relieved to have heard this because it explained so much about my physiology that had been unexplainable up to then. The doctor looked at me, smiled and said, "no, you couldn't have had those symptoms. You would have been in a very advanced state if you did." I explained that I did indeed experience those symptoms. "No, you couldn't have." He simply smiled and insisted I did not experience any of those.

I was too taken aback to know what to say next. He prescribed Dostinex for the prolactinoma on my pituitary and explained that the Hashimoto's was simply a marker and that I couldn't experience any symptoms of hypothyroid on it. His explanation of why went over my head since I'm not exactly an expert on endocrinology.

I moved here to Wisconsin and continued to take the Dostinex. When my prescription was going to run out, I figured I'd make an appointment with a new endocrinologist and follow up with him or her.

A few months after moving out here, things began to change, the biggest of which was my fatigue levels. I had started working out two months after moving in addition to the daily yoga I'd already been doing for a year prior to that. I had also started eating really well before that when I began doing yoga. So my diet and exercise routine was pretty envious of most people. Yet I was so tired all the time (and still am). By 9 pm each night I was falling asleep wherever I was sitting, despite getting 7-8 hours of sleep a night, which gradually increased to 9-10 hours as I became more tired and had to go to bed early.

And despite all the exercise, yoga, and good diet I was -- and continue to be -- sitting at 195 pounds. Despite my tall and large frame, 195 is still not a healthy weight for me, especially given that it isn't a lean and muscular 195 but a pudgy and flabby 195. Depsite exercise and yoga. My exercise routine included cardio and weight workouts, and yet my body shape wasn't changing, I wasn't decreasing in inches in any areas at all, and I wasn't gaining any muscle strength; the amount of weights and reps I could do several months before remained the same despite a religious 5-day workout schedule.

I tried all kinds of things -- decreasing my caloric intake (maybe I'm eating too much); increasing my caloric intake (maybe I'm not eating enough and my body is going into starvation mode); eating more protein (maybe that's why I'm so tired all the time); eating more carbs (maybe I just don't have enough fuel). Every change would give me about a 4-5 pound weight loss that would last about two weeks. Then the weight came back to 195 pounds. The protein helped my fatigue levels for about two weeks. Then my body adjusted and despite the daily protein shake, I was back to falling asleep at a whim.

Other things have happened that I probably shouldn't detail in a public blog, but if you can't talk about things clinically in a post about medical stuff...well, you should stop reading now. The additional problem I have is that in the last six months or so, my periods have become excruciatingly painful for one day out of the cycle, and now I'm vomiting through the pain. While I'd always had some pain and just needed to take Advil to get rid of it, the Advil isn't helping as much anymore and the vomiting is new.

And last month I noticed that my left eyebrow is going bald on the outside.

All of this worried Len and he pestered me to talk to the doctor about it all. After asking my general practitioner about it and explaining the diagnoses of the prolactinoma and the Hashimoto's, he sent me to an endocrinologist.

Now, let me state that I'm well aware that I'm not a doctor. But I'm a reasonable adult concerned now about my medical health, so I tried to put the pieces together. Increased fatigue, increased inability to lose weight, and loss of hair on my eyebrows, coupled with the fact that I have Hashimoto's. Okay, I thought, it sounds like my thyroid is in some kind of new stage. I'd better get this checked out.

The doctor's resident -- at least, I think that's who she was -- sat down and talked to me and listened to everything I said above. She spent about twenty minutes with me, complete with follow up questions.

After she walked out, the doctor I was told I was seeing walked in. He was an older man with a thick accent that sounded Eastern European. He palpated my thyroid so roughly that I was choking. He explained that he was putting me on bromocriptine for the prolactinoma to help with the infertility, and that I should see a fertility clinic because I'm running out of time to make babies. I asked him about the things I'd come in to see him for, the fatigue, the weight problem.

He actually waved his hands dismissively and said, "We can check your bloodwork but we won't find anything." I asked him what could be causing those things. He shrugged and said, "I don't know." He wrote out my bloodwork sheet to take to the lab and said I was done there. He'd spent five minutes with me, most of which he spent staring at my chest, and completely dismissed everything I'd come to him for.

So I left. I went down and got my bloodwork, and that was that. He's the doctor, right? I mean, if nothing's wrong with me, he would know. Wouldn't he?

As I put more thought into it, I got more and more angry. This wasn't in my head -- these things I'm experiencing are real. I received the report about my bloodwork and saw that my TSH levels -- which determine your thyroid fuction -- are "within normal range." So therefore, nothing was wrong with me.

Then about two weeks ago a a friend of mine was diagnosed with thyroid cancer. It seemed fairly out of the blue; she's a young, healthy woman who suddenly began getting very tired all the time and had some unexplained weight gain. And it turned out to be thyroid cancer.

Now, I don't think I have cancer. But you can imagine how much this has really spurred me into thinking that something really is wrong with me.

I don't understand how I could be experiencing very obvious hypothyroid symptoms when I have Hashimoto's and hear two doctors tell me that I'm perfectly normal and must be imagining things.

These days I'm not working out (and I haven't gained or lost any weight from this change either). Because when I do work out, ten to fifteen minutes into my workout I feel like I'm about to pass out, so I have to sit down on the couch, whereupon I have a hard time staying awake. If I do any yardwork or housework I have to take frequent breaks or I feel like my legs will give out from underneath me.

But apparently I'm perfectly fine. Really.