PCOS

How funny! I've been sitting here all morning, examining myself in the mirror and lamenting the side effects of having PCOS. Thank God my body hair is light and you can barely see the facial hair. The skin tags can be removed eventually. The hump on my back is there to stay. The Type 2 Diabetes is also along for the ride.
I realize that 21 years ago this summer was my first encounter with PCOS. It was the time I got my first menstrual cycle. It has NEVER been normal/regular. For years I searched for an answer. There had to be a logical reason for me being crawled up in the fetal position on the floor sobbing from the pain of cramps. Changing my pads every hour was mind boggling. Thinking back, I should have told my family to invest in stock of feminine products. We all would have been rich!
It hampered my life. I can remember getting up from my desk and one of the boys in a nice way mentioning I must have sat on a red pen. I had bled thru my underwear, shorts (because we all wore shorts under our school uniforms to keep the boys from looking at our panties), and through to my skirt. I was mortified. Who wouldn't be?!?!?!
This continued through my teenage years. I even had one doctor tell me to just get pregnant and maybe it would fix itself. (I was 19 and unmarried and a college student!) Finally in my early 20's after seeing gyne after gyne and going on birth control pill after pill, I came across PCOS. I don't even remember how or where I found it. I just had recently switched doctors and luckily he was familiar with it. His wife also had it. What are the chances??? I was with him for a while and in a tragic accident he passed away. I bounced around to a few doctors until I found Dr. P. She is a godsend.
Whenever I call or come in, they treat me like family. She's honest and upfront with me. No holds barred. Sometimes to a fault. LOL! Thankfully she is just a few years older than me, so we will have a long road ahead of us together.
The same year I transferred to Dr. P that May I had just felt awful. I was real out of sorts and could not shake whatever was happening to me. I just didn't feel right. It felt like I had the flu that would not go away. My nurse practioner sent me to test after test to try to eliminate this or that. One Friday a few weeks later in June she had all the tests back. She left me a message at work to make an appointment to see her. My heart dropped. We were planning my dad's 50 birthday and I was preoccupied with helping my sister with anything I could. I called the nurse prac back and asked to speak to her directly. I could not wait to make an appointment, they could not get me in for awhile. I would go crazy in the meantime. I hate suprises so badly that the boyfriend and I exchange x-mas presents a few days before because I can't stand it.
She finally lamented and realized if she didn't tell me I would go insane, quite literally. I had Diabetes. I knew it was only a matter of time before I got the dignosis. It ran in may family and I had PCOS. It was inevitable. I was ready to fight it head on.
It has put life into perspective. My bf's dad died from all kinds of complications less than 6 months after we met and he also has it. His has progressed in a bad way and we recently added insulin to the mix, so hopefully this does the trick. Watching him feel like crap is hard. I feel helpless and I am used to him being the one helping me through.
Anyways, back to PCOS, I was watching Work Out on Bravo today and they were enrolling clients in a type of boot camp deal. The doctor who was advising Jackie, the gym owner, mentioned one of the ladies had an "Unusual Medical Condition". I knew right away what he was going to say next. It was the first time I had heard PCOS mentioned in a show not directly dealing with medicine. I had seen it on Mystery Diagnosis on Discovery Health but not on regular TV.
I'm curius to see how much other people have seen it out in the real world and what their experiences are with it. I know infertility is the biggest one, but what are the others??