In other, related news, I had a phone conversation that actually sent me into shock last night. The conversation was with Tracy L., a friend of a friend of D's friend Jen. Tracy had a child 3 years ago, her second, and about 3 weeks after she gave birth, she very suddenly couldn't walk, had disorienting diplopia, and experienced weakness and tingling in her extremities. (True, she didn't have neck surgery, but then, she didn't have preexisting spinal stenosis, either.) The docs told her she had MS, but she had no lesions on her brain scans and nothing wrong with her spinal fluid. Her (female) neurologist suspected it wasn't MS at all, but an immune response of some kind to the pregnancy hormones. Unfortunately, the neurologist couldn't find any research at all, even case studies, to back up that hypothesis. She asked Tracy to stop breastfeeding anyway, so that the hormones would more quickly flush out of her system. It's not clear to me how soon after she stopped breastfeeding that her problems went away, but she said that, in all, it was about five months of symptoms and then suddenly, everything just cleared up. Although most of her doctors would still say that Tracy has MS, she hasn't had any recurrence of symptoms in the 2 1/2 years since she got healthy, which is a much longer time period, she said, than one would normally see between MS episodes.
Interesting. As if that weren't enough -- Tracy also has several close friends who are ob-gyns, and they told her that what happened to her "happens all the time." Through them, she spoke to a handful of women from San Francisco to New York, all of whom went through exactly the same thing she did -- but all, like her, after giving birth. I am the only person she's heard of to go through this during pregnancy.
Tracy reassured me, saying she is certain that what I'm experiencing is pregnancy-related and that it will go away soon. Her advice was (a) not to breastfeed -- get rid of the hormones ASAP and (b) never go on the Pill, something else her neurologist told her. We compared Pill stories. I actually never used the Pill, because the first time I tried it, I had horrible, over-the-top responses to the hormones. Just like Tracy did. I didn't tell Tracy about my bipolar disorder, but of course that is very hormone-dependent, too. From my layperson's point of view, this seems to fit into a very coherent picture. Something like, Hormones = Bad.
I guess one reason my discussion with Tracy, revelation and relief that it was, put me into shock is that I had never considered that breastfeeding would have anything to do with it. Another reason, I suppose, is that I hadn't considered the possibility that the fluctuations in hormones after I give birth could potentially act as another trigger -- I'd just been thinking that whatever hormones came into the picture when I conceived Abby didn't agree with me, so when she left, they'd go away and I'd get better. I still think that's the most likely scenario, but I guess Tracy's story scared me a little bit, too. I am certainly hoping it doesn't take nearly 6 months after Abby is born before I get my body back to the way it was meant to be.
I asked Tracy at one point whether she, like I , felt offended that there was no research on this -- even case studies -- but she just laughed. Me? It makes me mad. I guess you can take the girl out of the women's studies program, but you can't take the feminism out of the girl. Or maybe you don't need women's studies to feel annoyed by the lack of information for women -- when my brother heard this whole story, he suggested I call Oprah.
Anyway, D was obviously thrilled to hear about concrete cases of just these sorts of symptoms occurring under just these circumstances and then vanishing like a bad memory. I was, too. In fact, I was very relieved to speak to someone who could make me feel like less of an aberration, something other than a medical freak show. My intuition that this is pregnancy-related was so strong, though, that I don't think I was quite as worried as D that we'd got it all wrong and I'd be like this forever. Instead, the million dollar question for me has been how long will it take to get back to normal -- a question that remains, now alongside another question that shares its space: to breastfeed, or not to breastfeed?
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