This post is going to talk about various health-related things, including my endo. Feel free to skip it.
So my next endo op is scheduled for February 1st. It's a little way away but my gynaecologist goes gallavanting off somewhere over December and January. In the mean time, though, I'm having a lot of problems with migraines and endo pain and just generally feeling pretty shitty. My GP says he can't give me anything for my migraines because I'm trying to get pregnant and that I should just deal with it. When I was looking at my health insurance provider's website to check out what would be covered for my next op, I noticed that Naturopathy is covered so on a whim I booked a Naturopath consultation and had that this evening.
I'd never seen a Naturopath before so I wasn't sure what to expect. The first thing I noticed was her amazing voice. She had a Canadian accent, I think she was maybe Chinese-Canadian or Philippine-Canadian, and she had a beautifully modulated voice. It's what I would call a therapist voice. I immediately felt calmer and reassured. The consultation was in a room that was lit only with a lamp so it didn't feel like a harsh doctor-style consultation. She told me that she would ask me a lot of questions and that they might not seem related, and that she wanted me to let her know if there was anything I wasn't comfortable doing or talking about or was unsure of because she wanted to make sure I felt happy enough to come back.
The consultation was part doctor, part therapist - she let me just talk about a lot of stuff, especially relating to my fertility, which was really nice. I broke down and bawled my eyes out at one point and she just patiently waited for me to get myself back together and then reassured me that my feelings were normal.
Once we'd done the initial discussion she told me that she thought I had too much damp heat in me, that my spleen was squished from sitting down, and that the rising heat was contributing to my migraines...And I thought Here we go, airy-fairy time. But that was the only airy-fairy bit: after that we talked about improving my diet by eating more protein and veges and less white bread, and getting 20 minutes of exercise in the sun each day. She gave me a couple of supplements to help with my endo symptoms and recommended weekly acupuncture, and we agreed that the short-term goal is to get me pregnant before I need my next endo op.
One of the things I was really impressed with was that she didn't mention my weight at all. I actually went in prepared for a fight over that (completed with this letter) but it simply wasn't an issue. The diet and exercise stuff was what I was already trying to improve and was expecting her to bring it up, but the fact that she didn't relate that back to my weight was lovely.
Unfortunately with the dosage of the supplements she's given me on top of my pregnancy multi-vitamin I'm now taking 7 pills a day, eep! My plan at the moment is to follow her plan with the acupuncture, supplements etc until February, at which point I'll reassess if it's helping and worth it or not. I'm hoping that, if I can show Dave that it helps, I might be able to get him to see her too. We'll see!
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