no boys allowed in the room!!!!

I have 6 fibroids! I am trying to decide on names for them.

not "the duggars" !!

i wonder if i have a fibroid -- sometimes i get this really sharp pain in my ovary area before my period but i have never had it checked out

I am having a hysteroscopy in two days to scrape out polyps and fibroids. Super stoked. No, really. I cannot wait for this fucking period to ease up.

no kidding -- that sounds brutal and deeply unfun, like every waking moment stress 1x a month
good luck at the doc!

All women should get their thyroids checked. I had thyroid cancer in 2000 and that has made me super aware of thyroids and necks. Told two of my friends years ago I thought they should get their thyroids checked but they thought I was just all about thyroids and they were fine. I just noticed necks getting thicker, hair getting thinner, they'd complain about periods being heavier, being weird.... Finally they were checked at a health fair and one had Graves the other Hashimotos. My friend with Graves lost weight suddenly after a bad break up but it just looked odd to me, not the usual lack of appetite due to sadness. My friend with Hashimotos had years of bull shit trying to see why her periods were so heavy and painful and always got the run around, told it was probably cysts, given birth control pills....

I went gluten free despite never having had a thyroid disease, the two go hand and hand. Had a terrible stomach ache for 10 hours and it felt like I swallowed jalapenos. It burned and radiated. Went to see a doctor that day and did all these tests, asked for a Celiac test, just out of the blue, and I tested positive.Being gluten free has made a huge difference in everything.

yeah, I second what Tera is saying - both me and my sister have Hashi's, and now I am reading about how like 40% of people with Thyroid probs are undiagnosed. Even if your TSH is normal, you can still have problems. My TSH was 3.4 (technically "normal" according to some labs), but my thyroid antibodies are sky high!

i got a baseline test done a few years ago just so there would be something to compare to should anything go awry. i'll make the appt but i have no idea what to ask for. what tests should i ask for when i go to the doc?

Thyroid antibodies
Free T4
Free T3
Reverse T3

That should do it.

Also I think most women should get a full hormone panel. Free Testosterone, Total Testosterone, Estrogen and Progesterone tested on Day 21.

ok thanks! seriously.

ALSO if you can, Cortisol and DHEA. I know this is a crazy amount of testing. I ended up seeing a hormone specialist who doesn't take insurance because I was tired of jumping from doc to doc. This new woman I am seeing is incredible. Every visit I have with her is like two hours.

omg
what a nightmare
i am really bad at going to the doctor
thanks for the tips!

Basically for the past six months every doctor has dismissed my problems. A Gynecologist dismissed my heavy periods by telling me it was just because I am overweight. All she could offer me was a birth control pill. Then my primary doctor just told me I was anemic and nothing else was wrong with my labs. Still, though, I had horrible fatigue, hair loss, extremely heavy periods, difficulty losing weight. Then I went to an endocrinologist specializing in reproductive medicine and she told me my thyroid labs were normal and that I didn't have PCOS because I didn't resemble a typical PCOS patient.

So now I went to this new woman, and yeah, I have a thyroid problem and I also have PCOS and it was because no one was doing the heavy labwork to really uncover it.

Wow! That is all exactly what my friend was told!

Ive had tests for thyroid stuff, pcos, fybroids, all those things that case this shit and nerp, I have none of it. I'm just cursed with a broken body for no reason. YAY :(

what are your symptoms trayce?

Flulike symptoms and cramps up to a full week before my period... really painful cramping for about 2-3 days during, sometimes insanely bad PMS mood issues as well (uncontrollable anger mostly, ugh). Sometimes I even cramp quite badly mid-cycle. I'm not on any BC at all, dunno if that does or doesnt help. I mean its good I dont have pcos or anything, but a little frustrating :)I've always just chalked it all up to not treating my health too well.

I mean I even get an actual fever and sore throat 1-3 days before my period, how the hell does that work!?

sounds like low progesterone to me.

I've also had mysterious flu-like symptoms off and on for years. My sister and I both have. Sometimes I'll just feel like crap for no reason, and I'll go home from work but then feel fine a few hours later. Now I am wondering if it was when antibodies were attacking my thyroid.

Hmm I'll look into that further, thanks!

I had horrible fatigue, hair loss, extremely heavy periods, difficulty losing weight.

this is me

well, I don't want to make you bummed out, but if you have rheumatoid arthritis symptoms (that's an autoimmune disorder), it's very likely you may have another (like a thyroid problem). Definitely get it checked out!

Unfortunately, we all have to be a little pushy to get the care we want. Your standard GP will only test for TSH (thyroid stimulating hormone), and call it a day if it's in the normal range. Really, though, to get the complete picture you need to look at symptoms and the labs, not just labs only--and more than just TSH. Ideally, you need all the ones I listed above to see what's going on.

I finally looked into this seriously because I had a vaginal ultrasound in July on Day 27 of my cycle and I had not yet ovulated (the doctor called out the fact that she could see the egg hangin' out in my ovary still). Two days later my period started. Sooo, I had definite confirmation that I hadn't ovulated at all. I knew that wasn't really a very good thing for someone 33 to be experiencing.

Quick aside: two good cartoons re street harassment that I've been shown or stumbled across recently!

http://the-toast.net/2013/08/21/suggestions-for-street-harassment/

http://toastcdn.manderleyllc.netdna-cdn.com/okay/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/punished.jpg

I'm just going to link to this one, after seeing how small the previous img is. http://www.ihollaback.org/resources/street-harassment-etiquette/

I love that Toast comic so much.

I knooooooooow! "They look really practical but also stylish!" ftw.

OMG there's a link in the comments of the Toast comic to someone's FB where theres one of ThoseGuys that there ALWAYS FREAKING IS who has to pull the "but not all men are like thaaaaaaaaaaaat" whine.

Jam a fedora up it, ya knob.

Ergh my grammar was all over the place there but you get the idea.

haha yes I know exactly what you're saying. The universal language of Fedora Guys.

I don't even know what Pretty Pretty Princess is, fyi.

It's one of those "Huh, I am getting pretty old..." things where the kids I follow on Twitter reference cultural touchstones that I've never even heard of.

Actually I didn't know who Lisa Frank was until I looked her up a few months ago because somebody kept referencing her on a blog I read.

was it the 'lisa frankfurt school' tumblr because that is the best thing (i don't really know what lisa frank is either, but i think that's a nationality and not an age thing)

Yeah I only know who she is now cos of ILX haha.

No, it was some person's individual fashion blog. I actually get annoyed at the blog a lot because this person dresses like she's 13 and is in her 30s (and takes a lot of her style cues from Lisa Frank art), but she has a really good weekly link roundup that is worth sticking around for and I am trying to be less judgmental about adult women who want to dress like Rainbow Brite.

http://mobile.businessweek.com/articles/2012-10-18/convincing-women-in-china-theyre-too-hairy

my dream is that there would be a thread/forum on the internet exactly like ilx's rolling metal thread, with one difference: women post on it.

Lisa Frank lives in Tucson – I was talking to someone yesterday who grew up here & spent her childhood thinking Lisa Frank was just a Tucson phenomenon. "She taught me that you can paint without using any black," she said. I had spent the previous night looking at a Goya book and thought – no black, how awful! I know they're not even at all the same kind of art. I didn't even like Lisa Frank as a little girl; I was just the right age that eventually SOMEONE gave you a bunch of Lisa Frank swag, and you had to put all those goddamn stickers on SOMETHING.

What's going on re: this thread? "My feminist whatever" stuff just makes me so sad, mad, etc., I quit even thinking about it, or reading, even though it is very important to me. But it still comes up like some Whac-A-Mole game. I had a dangerous near-miss with a strange man recently, and I don't really want to discuss it, but it made me so mad, like apoplectic, "this would not happen to a guy." I feel like the police can't/won't help you on this stuff. I got it all out by cleaning my house VERY QUICKLY; it made me feel Mormon. Everything loops back on itself.

I'm sorry abbs.

We support u. Many <3s

It's hard when you are too aware of how profound the rifts in the world are. You can't fix them but you can make them recede a little, all that dancing over the abyss stuff.

But man, the micro-aggressions will really get you.

more <3 to you from me too, Crabbits

It's hard when you are too aware of how profound the rifts in the world are

yes!! and this (plus my one good but occasional lunch companion at work) = the only place I can find anyone else who even seems to SEE them and not go "nobody else has ever mentioned noticing any of these so-called rifts, you are just whining, did you ever stop to think how whining makes YOU the rift" etc forever and boy does it drive me mad. but, dance, recede, that is a thing to work on I guess.

that "man who wakes up with temporary amnesia after surgery and tells someone he thinks is a complete stranger that she's hot but in actuality it's his wife" viral video on facebook yesterday is sooooo fake.

yeah definitely. but i really really really wanted to believe it

rescreening this thread. god, gbx posted on it like 50 times, how annoying

let's talk about how great the dirty dancing soundtrack is.

omg I have been listening to "hungry eyes" like 10x in a row for like five days straight.

my sister and i were talking about how when we were little we thought all the songs on that were from the same era, somehow

ha i had it as a kid and dragged my mom and my friend and her mom to the dirty dancing TOUR that summer
i'm neither proud nor ashamed of this, it just was something that happened

it would be hard to choose between la bamba sdtk and dirty dancing sdtk

i love DD soundtrack so much

I WANT TO KNOOOOOHOOOOOOOW
WHERE ARE YOU TOOOONIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIGHT