These welts, turned into full blown hives. And when I say hives, I do not mean a small rash. I'm talking huge raised, red welts that itched and burned and if God-forbid you should dare to actually scratch one in hopes of relief, the pain and burning was close to unbearable. This coming from a woman who went through natural childbirth with my oldest. I can tolerate most things pretty well. And they were not in places where you want things to itch. My rear, my private areas, all over my breasts, my stomach and back, my "trunk" for lack of a better term was covered. They were not all day and were definitely worse at night. Benedryl seemed to control them but I was to the point of taking 6-8 per day and living on an influx of caffeine to keep myself going. Needless to say, this was not the way to parent, let alone live. So I finally went to our family doctor.
He prescribed steroids. Which makes perfect sense. I was describing what appeared to be an allergic reaction to something and over-the-counter antihistamines were no longer cutting it. Besides the nasty side effect of being wide awake, the steroids did nothing. I saw no relief from the hives. And then one day a migraine hit. This was not abnormal, I've gotten hormone induced migraines that correspond with my menstruation starting after delivery of my first son. Hormones, ladies and gentleman, are in charge of your body, don't you ever forget it. So I took a prescription strength (800 mg) Ibuprofen and waited for relief. It didn't come and in fact the hives that had been relatively small that day in comparison to days past just got worse and worse. Until I was not able to sit down or be still at all, I was crying, I was in pain, I felt like my skin, all of it, was on fire. Besides the fact that my behavior was scaring me, it was scaring my children. So as soon as my husband walked in that door from work, I went to an after hours clinic. That was the day that it was explained to me that Ibuprofen makes skin conditions worse. I had basically done this to myself! I was given a steroid shot, which worked, even though I had been on steroids for over a week with little to no relief. And I was told to follow up with my doctor.
So I did. We decided to see an allergist. And until I could get to the allergist I was to track everything I put in my body. I've been food journaling now for over a year and a half. It is almost 2nd nature to me. The allergist asked all of the basic questions. Had I changed any of my soaps? Detergents? Cleaning products? Was I eating anything new? Was I doing anything new? And the answers to all of these questions was no... well sort of.
In February of 2011 I had started undergoing a series of hormone injections in hopes of slowing down the growth of pre-cancerous cells on my cervix. Since I was 18 I have undergone multiple procedures to remove these cells and this time the cells were much more aggressive than they ever had been before so we opted for a newer treatment. The hope was to give me a few more years, child-bearing years that is, before we needed to discuss other options. I've also for years had been dumping my eggs from my ovaries. I'll go through months where my ovaries release multiple eggs at a time and then have a year of complete normalcy. All of this internal behavior... hormone related. These hormone injections made me moody. I gained weight. I began to suffer from depression. I was put on yet more medication to help alleviate the side effects. And by June of 2011, 2 months into what I describe as "hive hell", we were done with the hormone treatment. And for all intents and purposes it worked. I've gone 2 years without any more growth of these cells and have not had an ovary dump (that's my own little catch phrase) since.
But at what cost to my body?
By July I had had allergy testing done. I was allergic to everything, at least it felt that way. Chicken (you read that right), all squash (yellow, zuccini, pumpkin, butternut, etc.), strawberries, pineapple, peaches, broccoli and the list of environmental allergies is too long to get into. But grasses were a big one. So for 6 weeks I gave up all of that in hopes of something. Anything! And by this time we were 2 months into summer. In. Texas. That meas 105-degrees and no wind and 2 little boys who wanted to stay busy. And I noticed something. Heat and sweat made the hives significantly worse. So not only was being outside horrible it kept me from going to the gym. The confinement of a sports bra (I'm a DD, so we must be locked and loaded for exercise) added to the heat and sweat meant that before I could get in my door and in a cool shower, the hives were rampant and I was miserable. So lets do the math: hormone treatment + steroids + no gym time = a very overweight and unhappy girl.
I know where some readers are going to go here, so I'll just stop you now. Obviously I have some fault in the over weight factor. I could've cut my calories from 1600 per day to 1200 when I realized all the other factors at play. But I didn't and hindsight's 20/20. It doesn't help me any to beat myself up about it now. And to be honest while I know it would've curbed the gain a little, it wouldn't have curbed it all.
And besides it turned out there were other problems to contend with...
Stay tuned for The Journey, Part 2.
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