hormone imbalance

Breast Milk Weirdness

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I am a 49 year old woman who has had 4 ectopic pregnancies. I have never carried a child longer than about 6 weeks. I have also had a hysterectomy and am down to one ovary. I think I have started menopause 3 or 4 times already judging by the hot flashes. Now that you know my brief medical history here is the weirdness – I have breast milk.

It is not much. I occasionally leak little drops but the fullness, heaviness and soreness is there. I have had the discharge tested and nothing out of the ordinary was there – except breast milk. I have had hormone tests and everything comes back ‘normal’. There is no ‘scientific’ reason why this is occuring.

Once the doctors thought it was a side effect of the medicine I am taking for PCS, The problem with that theory is it started occuring at least 15 years before I started the medication.

Occasionally it is bothersome but I think at this point I am just used to it. I get swollen glands sometimes and it REALLY hurts but other than that I ignore it. I dont even bring it up to the doctors anymore as they automatically blame it on the medication. Am I the only one in the world with this?

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Navigating Invisible Illness in the Age of Modern Medicine

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Much has been about said about empowering and educating patients to be partners in the healthcare dance. From the e-patient and e-health revolutions through the piles of research showing more engaged patients have better outcomes, all seem to point a more active role and increased responsibility for the patient in his or her own care. But how does that work when the illness is not clearly defined, is not easily diagnosed or for which effective treatments are limited? What does it mean to be an empowered patient with an invisible illness?

This is the question that many women face on a regular basis. Indeed, for a number of predominantly female disorders, whether hormonally modulated or not, there are often many years before the symptoms are addressed as real and not figments of the female imagination. Chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia are two such examples, but so are endometriosis and an array of other perhaps more subtle hormone conditions.

During those years before modern medicine and the research community recognize the reality that define a particular disease process; during the years when women are prescribed psychiatric meds for non psychiatric conditions; during the years when pain medications with diverse side-effect profiles blur the line between the original disease and the one that is induced pharmacologically; during those years, how does one become the e-patient, the e-woman, without becoming a physician herself?

Really, we want to know.
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