Adventures in weight loss...

I had gained 10 lbs in the last year, 5 of which came on pretty suddenly when I started having issues with my reproductive health.  I was tired all the time which didn't help at all.  I would get so tired I couldn't make it through 5 minutes on the Cybex machine.  It's not as if my body was responding to the weightlifting, anyway.  

Recently, however, things have begun to turn around.  I'm friends with a couple who like to be adventurous on occasion, and they invited me to hike with them at a local park.  I've always like to rockclimb, but I've never considered myself terribly fond of hiking.  Apparently, I love it...and so does my body.  We did our first hike on Aug 15th, and I've been trying to hike 2-3 times per week.  Since that first hike, I've lost 6.5 lbs!  Hiking for 1.5-2 hours 3 times per week and getting in my 10k steps per day has done more to help me get the weight off than any time I've spent in the gym.  

I'm not sure what to do about my energy levels.  They're still pretty low, but I'm trying to power through and not let up.  Maybe once the excess weight is off, my energy levels will rebound.  

My goal is to shed the extra 10 lbs and then start lifting to get my muscle definition back.

Maybe I'll take photos next time I'm out...

"Women's Health" Is A Joke

Our medical system is mesaes up.  It's been four months, and I still have no answers.  Dr. K says it's not endometriosis, Dr. M says it is.

Dr. M doesn't seem to feel like I should be able to make my own medical decisions and continued to try to talk me out of an ablation. I ended up scheduling a D&C, because that's what they want you to do.  Instead of doing the thing that will definitely take care of the problem, they want you to do the thing that probably won't fix it.  Heaven forbid a woman try to make decisions about her own reproductive health.

After scheduling the procedure, they called me a week later saying I would need to schedule a pre-op appointment since I scheduled the procedure more than 30 days after my last appointment.  At that point, I was done.  I cancelled my procedure.  I am done with appointments, and I am done with this sham of a health care system squeezing every possible penny they can from me.  So, I guess I'll be exploring holistic ways to treat uterine polyps and abnormal bleeding.  I'm so exhausted with it all.

But then my cycle started for the first time in three months.  Dr. K allowed me to just take out my Nuvaring and put in a new one instead of leaving it out for a week.  There have been...irregularities.  So much for being done with appointments, though.  I'm going back to see Dr. K to tell her the latest (rather disgusting) developments in the saga of my wonky reproductive system.  But I'd rather see her than Dr. M.  I have faith in Dr. K's competence.  I seriously can't stand Dr. M and her condescending attitude.  She was supposed to do a scope of some kind so she could actually look at what is going on in there, but she didn't get around to it the two times I'd see her before.  So, I'm going to see if Dr. K can do that while I'm there.  I'm at the breaking point with all of this.  I'm either going to have a psychotic break, or I'm just going to stop caring.

When I see her, I'm going to request a partial hysterectomy and see what Dr. K has to say about it.  I would rather them just take out everything, but taking out ovaries make it even more difficult.  If I leave the ovaries, they'll still function as normal.  I just won't have anything to grow a kid with.  And that's fine.  I've had four months to think about this.  I don't want biological children.  I'm not sure I want children at all.  I don't think I'm cut out for it.  I don't have the patience one needs for child rearing.  So...I just want to be as done with all of this as I can be.