Trying to conceive and coming off

Started 5 July 2024 · 21 replies · 249 hearts · read 2.8k times

NkechiAbuja, NG · 5 July 2024

2 years ago

Something I have been sitting with: Trying to conceive and coming off Not looking for advice so much as other people's experience.

I have had this diagnosis for a long time and none of the general advice quite fits me.

I have had this diagnosis a long time and none of the general guidance quite fits, which is why I am asking here rather than in the wider circles.

What I cannot work out is which of the two stories a particular change belongs to, and I suspect nobody can tell me from the outside.

I have written out my results as a series rather than as single figures, because the trend is where my question actually lives.

Thanks all. This circle is the only place I have found where I do not have to explain the background first.

GavinDundee, UK

Fifteen years of being told to try harder, and then one appointment where somebody actually explained the insulin side of it. I was furious for a month and then relieved.

12me too 4

PrunellaBury St Edmunds, UK

What Gavin described happened to me too, in a slightly different order.

Coming back two years on to say things are steady, that my cycles are regular for the first time in my adult life, and that I am still slightly astonished by it.

TansyLudlow, UK

Picking up Gavin’s point rather than starting a new one.

Nothing here is medical advice, and with this in particular the specialist who knows your history is worth more than any consensus in a thread.

MiraFacilitatorRotterdam, Netherlands

Being taken seriously comes up in almost every thread in this circle, and it deserves more than passing agreement each time. If that is where you are, you are in the right room and you are not the first.

TinukeManchester, UK

Building on what Tansy wrote rather than answering the original question.

I asked specifically about the fertility side before starting and got a clear answer and a plan, and I would push anybody to have that conversation early.

RinManchester, UK

The dismissal is the part that lingers. The physical side has been manageable; being disbelieved for a decade is what I am still working through.

FreyaReykjavík, IS

What I would say is bring the whole history to the appointment. Mine was treated as a new problem for years because nobody joined the dots backwards.

CallaWellington, NZ

My cycles changed within about four months, which nobody had told me to expect and which turned out to be the thing I most wanted to talk about.

MaeveSligo, IE

I have been under a specialist throughout and I would say that made an enormous difference compared to being managed generally.

GittaBonn, DE

#10

The hair side of things is its own subject and I found the general advice unhelpful because it did not account for the underlying picture at all.

TildaCambridge, UK

#11

I keep a very simple cycle note alongside everything else and the correlation is visible over a year in a way it never is over a month.

10me too 1

MaryamBirmingham, UK

#12

The question I wish I had asked earlier was what specifically we were aiming to change, because "improve" turned out to mean four different things to four clinicians.

NadiaCairo, EG

#13

Somebody in this circle has almost certainly had your exact combination and will say so if you post it. That has been true every time I have watched somebody ask.

AnnaAthens, GR

#14

Reading Maryam, I recognised more of that than I expected to.

My bloods moved in a direction my GP described as encouraging, and she then spent nine minutes explaining what that did and did not mean, which was the useful part.

SaraOslo, NO

#15

Coming back to what Maryam wrote further up, because it is the bit I keep thinking about.

Something I did not expect was how much of my long-standing hunger pattern was not a character flaw. That took a while to sit with.

BeaDublin, IE

#16

What worked for me practically was resistance work twice a week. Not for any aesthetic reason — the effect on how I felt was noticeable within two months.

6me too 4

NualaArmagh, NI

#17

My cycles came back after years of nothing and it was genuinely emotional and I had absolutely nobody to tell until this circle.

NikitaYerevan, AM

#18

Bookmarking this. Thank you.

GudrunAkureyri, IS

#19

Nikita — yes, and the bit that took me longest to accept was the next part.

I have found this circle more useful than any other resource, mostly because everybody here already knows the background and I do not have to explain it.

MiraFacilitatorRotterdam, Netherlands

#20

A standing note for this circle: if your experience of this has been uneventful, please say so. Threads about long-standing conditions skew hard towards difficulty, and the ordinary accounts are the ones nobody posts and everybody needs.

NadirCasablanca, MA

#21

What I underestimated was how tangled this is with everything else. Sleep, mood, cycles and appetite all move together and no single one explains the others.