health

First on the list of updates is my crazy weight situation. Before I go on, trust me... I am not trying to rub in that I lost weight. I'm not proud of it. This was the weirdest thing that has ever happened to me!

If you've kept up with the blog, you know then that the past 6 months have been a whirlwind, to say the least. I thought I was handling it fine. I lost 15 pounds in 8 weeks. It was horrible. I had NO idea why it was happening and why my appetite was virtually non-existent. It took me all of 23 days postpartum to lose every bit of my 23 pounds of pregnancy weight. I wasn't sure why that happened so fast, either. As a nurse, you'd think I'd put two and two together, but I guess it's just different when it's me. My signs and symptoms lined up perfectly with a condition called postpartum thyroiditis. It affects women up to 8 months postpartum... which was where I was. So, I thought... sure, this is it, I'll go to the doctor, they'll draw some labs and my thyroid will be all outta whack. Take some thyroid pills and be back to normal. Well, the signs and symptoms of thyroiditis also seem to mesh perfectly with depression and anxiety. :-/ I have a history of anxiety... mostly during nursing school. I'm not sure who can make it through nursing school without at least one panic attack. :) Anyway, I took anxiety pills back then, to get me through nursing school without being one huge panic attacking, hive covered weirdo. I should have recognized the signs. But I did not. When the doctor told me all my labs were normal, and then asked me if I wanted to start anti-depression meds, I was still in denial. I was sure this wasn't it.

Well, my history is with anxiety... this was depression. I did not know that postpartum depression can show up any time within the 12 months after a baby is born. Now I know, and I'm no longer in denial about it. I know there's nothing crazy going on with my body, thankfully! I'm now taking meds to correct the issue. Meds that also happen to have a side effect of weight gain. I drink Ensure, I eat protein bars, etc... my appetite is finally coming back, and in 4 weeks of being on the meds, I have gained 2 pounds! Doesn't sound like a lot, I know, but trust me... I am SO relieved to see the scale going UP instead of down. I know that sounds so dumb, but when you have doctors telling you that if something isn't done to gain weight we will have to start getting "aggressive about the gaining" (I have no idea what that would have entailed, thankfully), your heart starts to break when the scale goes down again. So, I am trying to gain weight, trying grow back into my clothes. I don't wanna buy new clothes, because I don't ever wanna look like this again. And you know one thing that irritates me while I'm on the subject?! Heavy people can talk all day long about how big they are and how they wanna lose weight and they get all KINDS of encouragement... thin people can not openly discuss their weight issues because the response is always, "pshh, I wish I had that problem". Trust me, you don't. You feel disgusting, like you look like a walking holocaust victim, like your clothes are hanging off of you... it's gross, I don't like it. But, this is my blog and I can openly discuss whatever here, I suppose.

So, that's my crazy weird health story. Nothing special. Just a case of postpartum depression. Weird.