It’s difficult to choose my favourite symptom of this condition – the irregular periods, fatigue, mood swings, anxiety, weight fluctuations or the irony that you would have thinning hair on your head but excess hair growth in areas you don’t want (think of a bald-headed werewolf). 😒

Yes, my name is Yashi and I have PCOS.

Polycystic Ovary Syndrome (PCOS) is a medical condition which affects a woman’s hormone levels. I know what you are thinking – you mean even more than usual? Why, yes.

When a woman is diagnosed with PCOS, it means that her body is producing a lot more androgens (male sex hormones) than it should. This leads to a variety of visible and invisible symptoms, including cysts in her ovaries, irregular or skipped periods, insulin resistance and fertility issues.

Read more about PCOS here.

My diagnosis

I believe I was 18 when I was diagnosed with PCOS.  I remember that I had started getting short, light, painless periods about 2-3 times a month. I was also very underweight, the smallest I have ever been in my adult life. After the diagnosis, I was put on birth control pills, which usually help to regulate one’s menstrual cycle. And that it did, but I hated taking them. I also started slowly gaining weight, which I actually enjoyed at first until I started feeling really uncomfortable and insecure about it.

I also started to worry more. Worrying about the extra weight, excess facial hair, the risks of getting diabetes or heart disease, that I may not be able to get pregnant (though having children was not even a blip on my radar at the time). I even started worrying about my worrying. The worrying made me look to food for comfort, which would make me put on weight and worsen my symptoms, which would make me worry even more about my condition. It became a vicious cycle.

I felt defeated by my diagnosis. I felt defeated about my future. 😟

But I treaded along.  Dealing with it all as best as I could. I don’t remember talking to many people about it in the earlier years. I felt a bit alone even though it is a very common problem for women but it was largely undiagnosed.

False positive

I think one of the hardest moments of my PCOS story was around April 2014. My husband and I would have been married almost two years by then.  Like I said earlier, I hated taking birth control pills for more reasons than one, but a large factor was just having to remember to take them every day (to this day, I am HORRIBLE at taking vitamins, medication etc.). I switched to taking the birth control shot, which was just once a month. It was just the right amount of responsibility I was willing to take on. But a few months before, I started feeling I had enough of it all, being on birth control for almost nine years at that point, which only temporarily addressed the issue. I had PCOS so we didn’t have to worry too much about getting pregnant unless we did fertility treatments right? So I stopped. 

Some months passed, then a few more months and I didn’t see my period, started gaining weight and getting more cravings than usual. Wait, could I be…? It can’t happen that fast, that easily for me? Even more so, we were still enjoying life as a married couple, we didn’t plan to have children for a few more years.

So we took the next obvious step – get a home pregnancy test. My husband got the First Reponse test well…first. But we were confused by the results. One line meant “not pregnant”, two lines meant “pregnant”. Sounded simple enough. But what does it mean when there is one really deep pink line and one slightly faded pink line? Is that two lines? Is that really one line?

So he runs out and gets the Clear Blue test and I take it the next morning. The result would show either “pregnant” or “not pregnant” and even estimates the number of weeks. Now this was a test we could get behind. We are shocked to see the result – PREGNANT.

I called my gynaecologist to make the earliest possible appointment. Unfortunately, that would not have been for the next two weeks but I book the appointment.  All thoughts of not being ready for a baby go out our minds. We start fantasizing and acting like my tummy is housing our little bundle of joy.

The reality hit us so hard when the doctor was doing the ultrasound. There was no baby in there, only cysts. I was actually having a flare-up of my PCOS. I never expected to feel so devastated. I think I didn’t even go to work the next day. The PCOS had struck again.

The PCOS rollercoaster

The journey continued to have its ups and downs.

I would have high levels of anxiety for even the smallest things. When I look back some could be kind of funny. My friend had introduced me to some delicious hotdogs by a guy named Hiro, who would have his stall right outside the Valpark Shopping Plaza. He had disappeared for a while and I would have anxiety about where he was and not being able to find him again. He resurfaced a few years later in the same spot with a food truck making me wonder if I just passed at all the wrong times.🙈

I would have difficulty losing weight. But I kept trying. I would do every fitness challenge I was able to and I embraced the world of Zumba. I even tried Herbalife and was successful with the regimen of high intensity exercise and the meal replacement shake but of course that would be unsustainable. My downfall really was my eating habits but the frustration would drive me even more to comfort foods.

I remember doing a 50-day fitness challenge, which helped to establish a few small but sustainable healthy habits. Though I was nowhere near being a triathlete, I was feeling fitter and feeling proud. Until one Christmas, during a lime with some friends, a guy jokingly questioned if I wasn’t on a fitness challenge recently and whether it didn’t work. Sigh. His comments hit me harder than expected. I almost felt like challenging him to an aerobics or Zumba workout, just to show him that I can outlast him.

I felt almost useless to my husband, who was being so supportive and just wanted me to be healthy. I felt like I would be crushing his dream of one day becoming a father. I would try to push him away so that he wouldn’t have to suffer with me.

It was definitely a daily battle.  😕

Second time around

After that flare-up in 2014, I went back on birth control pills and metformin (yay more things to remember to take), which helps to regulate your sugar levels and is also said to help with PCOS symptoms. But now I was having a bit of baby fever.

Around that time, some of my closest friends and my sister became pregnant. I was so happy for them all, knowing that they would be great moms and excited to meet their bundles of joy but at the same time, I wondered if I would ever get to have one of my own. 

I had a check-up with my gynaecologist in December 2015. I had decided that if the cysts were gone, I would stop using the birth control pill again. I was determined to not be dependent on it.

My period became fairly regular and I continued to try my best to exercise and eat somewhat right (I can’t lie to MOY readers, this was HARD and I didn’t always succeed).

I somehow managed to still muster up some faith that I would get pregnant but tried not to dwell on it too much. Of course, when it comes to myself, I am pretty impatient, so I still expected fast results. Yep, I was that girl who hated going through the process and wanted to get everything right on the first go. A year and a half went by and still no sign of a baby.

I would get advice on both extremes –  some persons telling me that your body takes a while to readjust after being on birth control for so long and then other people telling me that my biological clock was ticking and that I should try harder to get pregnant. 

I remember it being the end of September 2017. My husband and I were on a date at Kava during TT Restaurant Week. We were having a discussion about it and I told him that I was really going to stop worrying about getting pregnant and just go with the flow. If it was meant to happen, then it would….

Déjà vu

I tell you God really has a sense of humour. I always picture Him laughing when He was listening to our conversation. The very next week I started feeling nauseous constantly.  I didn’t know what was going on.  My period was very short and light earlier in September but I thought nothing of it since in August, it was soooo long and heavy, that I figured it made up for September too.

When the nausea wasn’t going away, we decided to try to at least rule out pregnancy. So I sent my husband out to get a pregnancy test. We forgot all about our previous experience so he asked the pharmacist for the most accurate one and he was given…the First Response kit. So again I took it and we were confused by the results. Then he got another Clear Blue and bam! No it didn’t explode, it said I was pregnant. But at this point, I didn’t trust the results and I really don’t know if I will ever believe a home pregnancy test again. I set up an appointment with my doctor which I got the same week. My husband had to work so I went alone but I mean, I didn’t think he would be missing anything.

When the words “you’re pregnant” were uttered to me, I don’t know what I did. I think I was just in shock. My doctor told me I was seven weeks pregnant and that the baby was due in May 2018. She added that the baby was conceived on Independence Day (August 31^st) and joked that we were making our own fireworks that day (ahem, we kinda were). 🎆🎉✨

I left her office, still in shock, and called my husband while I was driving home (hands-free people so calm down). We couldn’t believe it. I cried right after that phone call and he would later tell me that he cried as well. We were going to have a baby.

PCOS status

Fast forward almost a year and a half later and we now have a very healthy, very active ten-month-old baby girl.

So I made an appointment with my doctor so that we could check the status of my uterus. So just two Thursdays ago, my ultrasound showed that I have very mild signs of cysts. While I would greatly prefer hearing there were no signs at all, it was still somewhat of a relief.

Taking back control

PCOS has dictated a lot of things in my life. And I let it.

But what I see now, and even what God has shown me, my PCOS condition doesn’t define me. It is something I can learn to manage. So I have decided to actively do the following:

• Exercise – believe it or not, I actually love exercising and miss not being able to just pick myself up and go to a Zumba class or join my friends on a 5K. But with my little one going to turn a year soon, I am hoping that this would become a more regular event and that I can even take her with me.

• Watch what I eat more – Now this is the MAJOR challenge for me especially since my sweet tooth recently came back (it was more or less non-existent during pregnancy and for the first six months after). But I honestly feel like food doesn’t comfort me the way it used to but I have my moments. It is a work in progress but having a healthy diet can help enormously with your symptoms.

• Make more people aware – I am very grateful that more people are talking about PCOS and more women are getting diagnosed properly because now you would know what you are dealing with. The problem is with other people who do not understand. They would give advice like “Just lose weight”, “Cut out sugar”, “Don’t worry so much”, not realising that we fight these cravings every day, losing weight is difficult and takes a lot of self-control, and that we get anxious and depressed very easily. We have to work much harder than the average person to reduce the symptoms but they may not fully disappear.

• Surround myself more with the people and the things I love –  This does wonders for me to deal with my PCOS. My family, friends, nature, writing, getaways – they help me keep a positive outlook about myself and on life.

• Give myself a break – For too much of my life, I have given myself a hard time. Beaten myself up whenever I gained weight or was crazy emotional. But I have realised that that would not do any good. It is just another life challenge that has shaped my story and will help me help others who are going through the same thing. I have so much to be thankful for, despite all the odds against me, I still was blessed with my baby girl. So if it is in the cards for you, it will happen. But don’t beat yourself up if it doesn’t.

• Start saving for electrolysis treatments – Hey I said I wouldn’t beat myself up but a girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do! 💁‍♀️

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