Not Thyroid....

A month later and after a week and a half on low dose cortisol I am feeling some better.  Apparently I have the non-disease of Adrenal Exhaustion.  Most main stream doctors do not recognize it (the sames one who wouldn't believe ulcers were caused by a bacteria, or that you can have mild hypo-thyroid or that CFIDS was real - all of which have since become accepted by the mainstream medical community).  So I have a non-diagnosis that actually has a good treatment protocol for getting back to normal.  It does explain a bunch of symptoms that did not fall anywhere in the auto-immune diagnosis.

Last month was pretty much hell, I had constant anxiety with no energy to support it, so I was exhausted and anxious all at the same time.  My blood pressure was even lower than normal, my heart rate was always over 90 and my emotions and moods were all over the place.  I couldn't eat, was not sleeping very well and my whole normal body clock changed.   I honestly thought I was having a psychotic break or some kind of mental crisis.  When I wound up in the doc's office sobbing because all of my thyroid results were "within normal ranges" I managed to move the new doc in the office enough to get her to confer with my doc and they put my non-autoimmune symptoms together (and the newest ones of anxiety and severe fatigue) and came up with the fact that being ill for so long has probably exhausted my adrenals, that or my immune system is attacking my adrenals as well and I am on my way to Addison's Disease (which would be terrible so I hope not!). 

So in response they put me on a trial of low dose cortisol (aka hydro-cortisone), and I noticed a difference the very first time I took it.  My anxiety was cut in half, I was able to sleep and eat again and the terrible exhaustion went away.  I have been on it for a little over a week now and from research I am tracking my temperatures and blood pressure and being careful with supplements  because some of them seem to make me a lot worse or cause other problems.  I tired pregnenolone (which is a precursor to most of the adrenal hormones) and while it brought my blood pressure up to a normal 120/70 (from my norm of 90-100/60-70) it also gave me a terrible headache and a HUGE drop in energy in the afternoon and also made me sleep in the next morning which I have not needed to do in a while.  It is possible that I just took too much but I will figure that out with my doctor next time I go. as for right now it is on the bad experience list. 

All in all I am a lot more stable, my moods are closer to normal again though I still have some anxiety and restlessness.  Compared to last month it is a picnic and I can keep busy to keep my mind off of it.  I am doing a lot of research on adrenal exhaustion, I think I have had the fatigue part for several years, it just got chalked it all up to abnormal AS symptoms.  Its interesting to find out though that under symptoms I am in stage 3 out of 4 (where four is adrenal insufficiency aka Addison's disease).  The low dose Cortef has been a big help to me and I am hoping to get my dosage adjusted so that I can actually go back to being as completely normal (with of course continuation of my special diet for the AS and all over body wellness) as I can.  It appears that after a time period to give the adrenals a break - I shoudl be able to wean off the Cortef and let my body do its own thing again.

Lucky for me all the diet and stress reducing things the recommend are already stuff I have been doing just because of the whole AS thing.  I really just want to be well again, and I pray that this is the last layer that needs to be peeled back to get back to the healthy me.