In March this year I decided to take myself off all my medication.

The Prednisone, that is meant to keep the immune war at bay, the Plaquenil, an immune-suppressant drug that helps lubricate the Nancy Kerrigan knees and the Lyrica, that is meant to turn off the burning sensation on the soles of my feet.

I wasn’t advised by my medical team and nor did I ask them. After all, it is my body. I had just spent 6 weeks detoxing from an experiment with methotrexate. Words can’t begin to describe how horrible I felt on this drug. But I had had enough.

What was truly making me sick? The A.I. conditions or the medications?

In February after a routine gynaecological exam, because clearly I hadn’t suffered enough, the gynaecologist stated he was concerned about endometriosis and felt it needed to be investigated. I was approaching the end of my “fertile years” and if childbearing was on the agenda, best to check it out.

Childbearing could not be further from my mind, after all I was still pulling chunks of my hair out of the shower drain. Childbearing was never high on the list. In fact, the thought was (and still is) rather terrifying.

I did point out that in order to have children, I would need to be physically and emotionally well enough to even enjoy practicing and as a relative newlywed I wasn’t exactly hanging from the chandeliers.

He suggested I have some blood work to check my reproductive hormones, but expected no real surprises, “you’ve got to keep in mind that your body is going through enormous stress and sometimes it just shuts off unnecessary requirements.”

No shit, Sherlock!

But those words did spark off a chain of thoughts… somewhere and at some point I did recall reading that hormonal levels are often askew during active A.I flares. And with the majority of A.I. diseases affecting women, it would make sense to check reproductive hormones.

But after 18 months of appointments with specialists across many fields, no one had bothered to check reproductive hormone levels, despite the fact that they are directly linked to energy production, mobility, muscle building and strength. The three things I was struggling with on a daily basis.

To provide a little context on why hormones are important and often overlooked, here’s the skinny, or skip ahead if you’ve heard this before.

Hormones are a naturally occurring chemical substance, triggered by the brain and released through the body by glands across our body in short bursts and pulses. They make up endocrine system. The main glands that produce hormones are the adrenal glands, pancreas, ovaries, pituitary gland, thyroid, parathyroid and testicles. Ref betterhealth.vic.gov.au/bhcv2/bhcarticles etc…

As a CFS patient, cortisol levels are one of the first things my endocrinologist tested for in addition to my thyroid levels. Not only my Thyroid Stimulating Hormone (TSH) level, but also my T3 and T4 levels. To put it simply, a TSH level is an average calculated from T3 and T4 levels, therefore if you have an imbalance in either of these levels, the TSH is likely to mask it, therefore why your results come back “normal”. If you’ve never had T3 & T4 checked insist that you do, but be prepared as Medicare will not cover it.

Check out Better Health by VIC govt for a more detailed explanation here.

So in late February at a follow-up appointment with my GP, I asked if my hormone test results had returned, as I hadn’t heard from my gyno.

And as he sat there, pouring through the numbers, looking for any red numbers to highlight an abnormality, there it was.

Undetectable levels of Testosterone. WTF??!!

How long had it been like this? What caused this? What does this mean? Could this be part of the solution?

The short answer is “it could well be.”

Like all reproductive hormones they fluctuate over the course of a menstrual cycle, so diagnosis or treatment decisions based on one reading can be misleading and potentially dangerous. But when more than one came through at undetectable levels and all my other hormones indicated I was nowhere near peri-menopause, it was clear that for some reason the pituitary gland had stopped sending messages. It had simply turned the chandelier lights off.

Treatment and access to treatment when you’re diagnosed with an androgen deficiency is a complex and hairy beast. Google androgen deficiency, and if you live in North America, Asia or South America there’s no government approved treatment for women – it appears they don’t even recognise it as a medical condition.

If you live in Australia, you will come across many more articles suggesting “there is no standard treatment” and a diagnosis “is controversial” rather than “there is a possibility that this may contribute to the symptoms associated with auto-immune presentation.”

The key is to find a progressive endocrinologist who is prepared to say “we don’t know why it happens, but there are ways to reboot the system.”

I lucked out! I figured it was time! Professor Eden is the ducks-nuts of endocrinology and women’s health. Young, smart, approachable and empathetic.

As he told me, “I’m in the business of giving people hope.”

He explained the complexity of hormone testing and in particular the complications of measuring testosterone. It simply doesn’t exist! But what he was able to do was explain that testosterone is critical for women, but it’s not the amount circulated in the body that is important, it’s the 1% that is being absorbed by body tissue that is critical to understand. This is what’s critical to restoring energy and chandelier gymnastics.

Then he grabbed a pen and a piece of” to-be-recycled” paper and scribbled down a formula, which brought back nightmares of my university statistics class, and circled SGBH – sex globule binding hormone.

A healthy woman in her reproductive years should have a reading between 6-9. I was sitting at < 0.1. Clearly room for improvement.

The plan: application of transdermal (skin) testosterone cream daily for a month, retest the SGBH and see how my body responds.

There is one pharmacy in Australia that currently provides a testosterone cream specifically designed for women, and it is only available on script. The concentrated dosage is 1% and of course, the tube is pink!

I’ve been on testosterone cream since April, increasing in dosage and concentration under the direction of Professor Eden. I’ve also been off all other medication (except for a period post-operative to confirm my gyno’s original suspicions) because I wanted to see whether any improvement in my fatigue, joint pain and mood was directly due to the hormone replacement.

I can report that in the last four weeks I have been able to:

• return to a one-hour yoga class – weekly
• return to a one-hour Pilates class – weekly
• I got back on my road bike for 30mins, in windy conditions and didn’t blow away or blow up (once)
• I survived my first 45 min spin class
• And today, I returned to the pool and did slow laps with the rehab crowd (all over 50 and recovering from life’s little shocks and wake-up calls).

And last week’s blood test results showed an SGBH result of 3. Finally heading in the right direction.

Is this part of the puzzle?

I don’t know. But I’ll keep you posted.

 

For more info about Androgen deficiency, Monash Uni has some great info…check it out here.