Sugar, dun dun dun dun dun, Oh Honey Honey

Just wanted to post a little bit of an update.  After my initial post about the bicornuate and PCOS stuff, I got a lot of really nice comments and emails.  People sharing stories about their own lives that I hadn't known, or just offering encouragement or advice.  One of those people, I will call her T because I haven't asked her permission to put her name on here, has a kind of complicated family connection to me and I haven't seen her more than once or twice since I was young.  I knew she was a nurse, but it turns out she is a nurse at the Kaiser fertility specialist center that we were going to go to.  She gave her phone number and we talked for a good 45 minutes.

She recommended a doctor and explained a lot of stuff about bicornuate uteruses (uteri?) and PCOS and was very encouraging that while we definitely don't have an easy road, having children is very possible.  I hadn't actually verbally talked to a doctor about the bicornuate uterus stuff, or really even about the PCOS.  I've known I had PCOS since I was in high school, but the symptoms I could see and feel (weird cycles, etc), were treated by birth control.  I didn't realize there are other symptoms, like insulin resistance, that aren't always treated by the hormones in the birth control.

I've been reading a lot about insulin resistance, because I know losing weight will help.  I've actually lost about 6 and half percent of my body weight since February, when some friends at school and I did a mini Biggest Loser competition.  But losing weight has always been hard for me.  There were weeks when I would eat well (and stay within points for Weight Watchers or calories depending on what I was counting at the time), I didn't cheat with anything, and I exercised 4 or 5 times in the week, but then I would stay the same or even gain weight.  And then weeks were I didn't do so great and I would lose weight.

T told me that women with PCOS very often have insulin resistance and therefore weight loss is incredibly difficult.  Do-able, but much more difficult that people with normal body chemistry.  From what I've been reading, my body stores sugars a lot more than it should. So things that I thought were healthy, like fruit, were stored more than they should of been.  The healthy fats and healthy carbs actually help break down the sugars.  So going low fat and low carb, but high sugar (even natural sugar, which I'd never paid attention to) actually made my body store more.  So I'm going to try adjusting my diet to a more diabetic-type diet and hopefully I'll lose some weight!

I read into some things that are supposed to help with insulin resistance, but I'm also balancing the hope that I might be pregnant.  Everything I looked into, like cinnamon pills and apple cider vinegar, either wasn't safe if you are pregnant or the complications with pregnancy were unknown.  I know I can't wrap myself in bubble wrap, but I feel like I should be doing everything in my power to stay pregnant once I get pregnant.  It's been so hard to get pregnant, I don't want to do anything that could jeopardize it.  I haven't had caffeine in months and basically being careful about what I eat and do in case I am pregnant.

I've also been reading a lot of PCOS specific diets.  Many of them recommend eating organic whenever possible, especially meats and dairy.  Organic meat means there's no added hormones (and same with dairy stuff).  My body can't even handle my own hormones, so I guess it makes sense that I shouldn't add additional hormones that don't belong.  The cost is very frustrating (especially for a couponer and deal finder like me), but if it helps us get pregnant, it's worth it.

In the meantime, T has been amazing (or a-maw-zing as Penny on Happy Endings would say) at helping me get an appointment scheduled and I have one for Thursday (happy birthday to me!).  Hopefully we can find something out other than "could be bicornuate, could be septate, we can't rule anything out."