It's your body. It's your health. It's your life! Take control!

What if you were able to order your medical treatment like you order a meal at a restaurant.  You get a menu on the menu is a list of possible medical conditions you can have according to your symptoms.  You look through the list and you find what condition you have.  Then you decide how you want to treat it.  You pick the medication you want, the therapy and the procedures.  Of course you ask them for their recommendations since they are the experts, but you specify exactly how you want to treat it. If it's not to your expectations, you can send it back.  Pretty far fetched, I know, but when you learn about your health and understand how it can be treated, you can kind of order the entree prepared the way you like it.

When my husband and I decided we wanted to have a baby, I had problems conceiving.  Or so I thought.

After a year and a half of unsuccessfully trying to get pregnant, we decided to go see a specialist at a fertility clinic.  I will never forget our first meeting with the doctor.  I came in all prepared with my file that I got from my gynecologist.  It contained all of my records for the 8 years that I had been her patient, including copies of all the recent test results I had done in order to find out if there was anything wrong with my reproductive system.  I started to explain to him what we had been trying up to that point.  I talked about all the tests done that showed everything was working for both my husband and I and I said we came to him because we heard he was the best fertility expert in the city.

The doctor very quickly flipped through my file, not spending more than a couple of seconds on any page, before looking up and asking why we were there.  I turned and looked at my husband all confused and then back at the doctor and told him I didn't understand his question.  So he asked, "what is the end result you wanted from all of this?"  "This meeting," I started to say, "to discuss why I haven't been able to conceive."  "No," he replied, "what exactly do you want me to do?"  I thought about it for a second and I replied, "I want you to help me get pregnant because I want to have a baby."  The doctor closed my file and put it on his desk and said, "then my job is to help you have a baby, it's not to figure out why you can't have one."  He proceeded to explain that he would try every procedure possible until I got pregnant but that there was no guarantees.  If I wanted to figure out why I couldn't get pregnant, that was something my gynecologist needed to do, that wasn't his job.

The doctor was able to get me pregnant via IUI the very first time we tried it.  I remember being so happy when my blood test came back shortly after the procedure, confirming it,  my body was producing the pregnancy hormone hCG.   A few days later I had another blood test done which didn't give us the news we were hoping for.  The concentration of the hCG hormone in my blood was not increasing and I was informed that the pregnancy was not viable and that we would have to skip the next month's ovulation cycle before we tried again.  I didn't understand what any of that meant.  I had never asked any questions about how this whole pregnancy thing really happens from a medical standpoint, I just thought that the sperm fertilizes the egg and then 9 months later, you have a baby.

Two months later we underwent our second IUI and once again, the initial blood test showed that I was pregnant, but a subsequent blood test revealed that my hCG concentration was not increasing.  I was devastated.  Why was this happening?  I was ovulating, my follicles were releasing eggs, my husband's sperm count was through the roof.  It didn't make any sense.

I called the fertility clinic and cried to my case nurse.  I asked her why this was happening and she suggested that we go through my file and read through all the reports.  She was going through the test results with me on the phone and they all seemed normal.  Then she said, "huh, that's not right."  "What's not right?," I asked. She proceeded to tell me that the report of my Day 21 progesterone test said my level was a 1 and in order to have a viable pregnancy you needed at least a 10.  I asked the nurse what that meant and she told me that  progesterone helps the uterus thicken in anticipation of receiving a fertilized egg. If it’s not thick enough, implantation doesn’t occur.  Could it be that my eggs were getting fertilized but not implanting.  But why wasn't my body, making enough progesterone?  The nurse didn't know the answer to that so I decided to educate myself on what this all meant.  How exactly does a pregnancy happen from the very beginning until that very end with a healthy baby.

Sure enough, it all traced back to my traumatic brain injury (TBI).  When i sustained a TBI, I injured my pituitary gland.  We knew this because while I was in the hospital following my injury, I developed Hyponatremia which is a condition that occurs when the level of sodium in your blood is abnormally low. When I researched it, I learned that, '"in most patients with TBI, hyponatremia is a feature of the syndrome of inappropriate antidiuretic hormone (SIADH) secretion due to pituitary dysfunction after head injury."  OK - so I injured my pituitary gland but how does the pituitary gland affect progesterone.  More researched, taught me that "the formation of the corpus luteum (which produces the majority of progesterone) is triggered by a surge in luteinising hormone production by the pituitary gland and luteinising hormone controls reproductive functioning by stimulating the ovaries to produce progesterone."

My brain injury was causing my fertility problems, I had found my answer.  Could my gynecologist and fertility doctor have figured this out?  Yes, they probably should have noticed the low progesterone level, but the reality of it is, they have hundreds of other patients to care for and this kind of information can be easily be missed.

The lesson I learned from this experience is the importance of knowing your own body and related health issues.  My gynecologist knew I had sustained a TBI because she had also been my doctor prior to my injury, but I never really went into much detail about it with her because I didn't think it was that important for my gynecologist to know.  I had absolutely no idea that the brain injury I had sustained 4 years prior would play a role in my fertility.  Even when I did consider that my injuries could possibly be the cause of the problem, I only focused on my pelvic area.  I had broken my hip and had surgery to repair it, and wondered if somehow that damaged part of my pelvis or uterus.

With the knowledge I learned I asked to be given progesterone after I had my third IUI and not only was I able to get pregnant and maintain the pregnancy but I got double the end result by having twins.

Become your own advocate if you want to get your end result with your medical care.  People may argue that is what doctors are for though.  They've gone through all the years of schooling and training.  They are the ones who are supposed to understand all the science, that is what they are paid for.  But, you are the owner of your body and its health. You ultimately make the decisions on what kind of treatment you get, so why not make an educated decision.

In today's world, it is not hard to find, out information about anything.  Articles, research, reports, videos, information, etc. it is all online at your finger tips.  Unless you have no way of accessing the Internet, there is no reason why you can't learn.  The excuse, I don't understand medicine or science is not a good enough reason not to educate yourself.  I have always found some kind of layman's explanation about the medical conditions I have and the associated health care treatments online.  I can then take that information and discuss it with my physicians to make what I believe is the best decision.  It's called due diligence and when faced with making any kind of major life decision, we all do our due diligence first so why don't we do it for all of our health care decisions?

It is OK to question your physician's advice and if they are the type of doctor that doesn't like their patients to be educated then maybe its time for a new doctor.

Our health care system is run by big pharmaceutical companies who are getting rich off you being sick.  The more drugs you need the richer they become.  I'm not saying medication is bad.  I take 3 types of medication per day, some of them twice a day for my anxiety, depression and sleep apnea syndrome, but I know exactly how that medication is helping me.  I know what chemicals they produce and what exactly those chemicals are doing to my body.  I was the one who went into my neurologist's office and told her what drug I wanted to take for my sleep issue.

For all our veterans who have to deal with the incompetence at the VA go to your appointments prepared.  You wouldn't go into battle unarmed, so don't go into the VA unarmed.  Do your due diligence and go in armed with all of the information you can possibly get.  Tell the doctors exactly the end result you want and how you want to get it.  It doesn't mean you will get everything you ask for but it is harder for health care providers to keep you in the dark when you have that information.

If you have PTSD understand why you have it, not just what caused it.  The blog post I did prior to this one talks about what PTSD is and there are so many articles online that talk about why that anxiety disorder occurs.

Take control about your health care.  Don't leave it up to the Government to decide or the physicians, many of whom are controlled by the drug companies.

It's your body.  It's your health.  It's your life!  Take control!