I have quite painful periods. I went to the gyno to try to find a solution, and he seemed to think I was asking for narcotics (which would have been stupid, because they'd have had to be taken every month and I'd just build up a tolerance and be back to square one). I finally made him understand, though only by talking to a nurse who actually took the time to listen, that I wasn't looking for drugs, and put me on birth control pills, which worked--the periods stopped being so painful. With one side effect--I ended up with high blood pressure.
Well, my doctor wouldn't believe that the high blood pressure was there because of the birth control pills; he kept blaming it on my being fat. So I went off the birth control on my own, and then tried not taking the diuretic for a day... blood pressure stayed normal. And kept being normal even after a week.
Ironically I'm back on blood pressure meds now, though not for high blood pressure primarily. I developed a cardiac arrhythmia and beta blockers solved the problem, though only after I insisted on wearing a heart monitor and the PVCs I was having finally showed up on it. (They're pretty harmless; most people have PVCs--they feel like a skipped beat--only I was having them so often that sometimes I got dizzy and had to sit down and sometimes couldn't walk nearly as far as I wanted to. I'd been having them for about six years at the time, but they'd gotten gradually more frequent until they were interfering with my life.)
Doctors still assume the beta blocker is for high blood pressure because I'm fat, even though my blood pressure on the beta blockers is normal and my heart rate is occasionally as low as 45 bpm due to a combination of regular exercise and the meds. Exercise which, by the way, my original doctor wouldn't even believe I was getting. Without a car and without the money for cabs, how exactly did he think I was getting to his office? Teleportation?
And yeah, I still have painful periods.
07 Nov 2013, 11:45 pm
