At the beginning of January, during a spell of exceptionally snowy weather, early morning, a certain young woman came down onto the street from the little room where she was staying at her parents' in C- Road and slowly, almost hesitantly, set off towards D- Medical Centre.
After more than 6 years of living with PCOS without proper diagnosis and suffering the shame of hiding the not-so-easy to conceal symptoms from both myself and the world, I finally decided to face my fear, suck it up, and see a specialist who could give me the proper medication for my problem.
Or not, because in fact despite being told otherwise by well meaning family who had 'researched' the condition, there is no drug, no therapy, no solution to deal with the symptoms of Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome. What a massive pile of wank that turned out to be. So here I am, a few weeks later, musing over the varied (but mostly limited, costly and thrilling in their potential for exciting and unusual side-effects) options available to me.
I'm having a grand old time.
So I figured that while I was at it I would write this blog, for two reasons. One: The Greater Good (!) I will guinea-pig-ize myself to some of the available treatments and such for coping with PCOS in order to help, myself of course, but also if possible to help those who are similarly afflicted. I am taking my sacrifice for (wo)mankind very seriously and not being at all big headed or boastful about it, obviously...
Two: PCOS is a horrible #*$! of a condition that gnaws away at the confidence and general mental health of many women who suffer from it. One of the problems for myself was that I didn't want to be associated with it, couldn't get over the mortifying obstacle of talking to someone about my symptoms in order to get any advice in the first place. Its not something that ever really gets talked about, unless its as a joke 'did you see that girl in Costcutter? I bet she'd earn more as the Bearded Lady in a circus', and even I have a certain unflattering stereotypical image of women who have PCOS. So I hoped that by writing this blog, anyone who happened to stumble upon it, 'victim' or not, could see that there are thousands of women (5-10% of all women of reproductive age apparently*) who have PCOS and that it really is a lot more normal than you think. And hopefully by the time I write my last post for this blog I will have found a solution for living with PCOS that I can share - here's hoping!
*Wikipedia - Not always the most reliable soure, granted, so direct from the NHS website:
PCOS affects millions of women in the UK.
About one in five women in the UK has polycystic ovaries, and approximately one in 10 has PCOS to some degree.
http://www.nhs.uk/conditions/polycystic-ovarian-syndrome/Pages/Introduction.aspx
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