Sunday, April 14, 2013

On myo-inositol and new blogs

First, lets get the annoying news out of the way- I seem to have mislaid my LH surge. The ONE thing, which is dependably seen in every cycle ever the past 3 years, is gone. I can't see a pattern anymore; I did ovulate last month based on a temperature rise, but it was a shitty cycle in that there was no CM, and the LH was an itsy-bitsy 12 days. GRR. 

Given all the stuff I do, I have to say that I'm really good at figuring out what is responsible for which effect, and this one I'm blaming on myo-inositol (down from 2000 mg/day, to 1000 mg/day). Its playing havoc with my cycle. Its freaking amazing for my skin. Definitely cause for shaking my fist at the universe.

I'm not going to give up on it just yet through; I'm going to keep taking it over the next 2 months and see if things change/settle down, and maybe I'll keep taking it till IVF anyway, and just use a trigger. 

The amazingly frustrating part is that myo-inositol is supposed to do GOOD things

  • It is great at fixing the issues in women with PCOS. It can, to a large extent, shown by multiple studies, fix acne and hirsuteism, bring down LH and androgens (definitely doing that with me) and restore ovulation in women with PCOS.
  • It can increase the proportion of mature oozytes at pickup during IVF (!!!!).

 I'm not sure what to do. Yes, my cycle looks utterly shitty now, and what I took for gospel truth--that if you had perfect cycles, you would have good eggs--has not held true for me. Sure, I got pregnant almost everytime I tried with my natural cycle, but something was off, 2 out of 3 times, my eggs may have been aneuploid. So maybe the lower LH is good, and such crappy cycles may actually get me live babies. Unlikely, but knows right?

Plus, I like what its done for my skin. Don't want to stop taking it, at my current lowish dose, ever.

So there is my current conundrum. I'm ok despite it though. I really, really relax during my breaks from TTC, I have to say. Probably because TTC itself is such stress, and has never got me good news yet, not trying to make a baby makes me feel so much more better. Its like when the dentist stops drilling on the tooth with the exposed nerve. It is too bad I'm determined to have a child, and TTC will have to recommence at some point.

The other news is that I will be starting a wellness blog using my real name and identity. Having a widely- read blog is good for me professionally, given that I've started building a career in scientific communication. The face-palm moment arrives when I realize I've started a blog that is visited by people all over the word, has gone over 200,000 page views, shows up quickly in Google searches, and I most definitely cannot list it on my LinkedIn page about it because too much of it deals with deeply personal issues.

What I'm going to start doing, is take away all the science from here slowly, and move it to there, and incorporate it into the general health topics I will discuss. So there, I'll be talking about infertility, autoimmunity, fibromyalgia, autism, discussions on healthy practices, etc. What I do best is gather, assimilate and distill scientific information, and I flatter myself in saying that I do it rather well.  

When the new blog is started- most of the science on this blog (the stuff on vitamin D,  the science of infertility page) will go away. People who want the address of that blog, will have to contact me on an individual basis. I'm a little (actually very) leery about people linking the real me to all the deeply personal information that is on here, so I will have to think about how to handle things. Would have been so easy to just put a link on this site, but nothing in life is straightforward is it?

1 comment:

  1. How did you choose the dosage of the myo-inositol? I've been taking 4g/day, but I *think* I'm just finally ovulating today/tomorrow (CD36) when I usually O between CD19-30 if I'm going to at all. Damn PCOS.

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