The last 12 months have been a bumpy road! I don’t think anyone could have predicted just what an impact Covid would have on the world.  I have been relatively lucky that Covid’s impact to me personally has been limited to stopping me from going where I need to go internationally, but other than that I haven’t lost loved one or been in complete lockdown for months like many people.  I am lucky to live in a country that had the means to provide healthcare for all those that needed it, vaccinate early and also lift lockdowns to allow life to continue even with some adjustments for social distancing and mask wearing.  A reason I am grateful to live in the UAE.

One big impact COVID did have on me however is delaying my ‘having a baby’ plan. Getting to Cyprus where my eggs and donor sperm are was not possible for almost a year and even now it is technically possible, but there are a lot of restrictions, testing, quarantining etc.  So with the already challenging journey I am on COVID definitely hasn’t made it any easier.   

I have tried to view the delay as the universe telling me that the timing wasn’t quite right yet, however as I turned 46 in April there is only so much ‘universe patience’ one can have.   I know my eggs aren’t getting any older because they are frozen, but my body certainly isn’t getting any younger and I don’t want to be a mother who can’t run around with her kids, so pandemic or no pandemic I need to get this baby show on the road and that’s what I am doing.

Northern Cyprus is still on the UK’s ‘red list’ so if I was living in the UK right now I wouldn’t be able to get there, but from the UAE I can at least get there,  I mean it isn’t easy what with having to pre-pay government accommodation, quarantine for 10 days on arrival, PCR tests before you travel, when you arrive and before you return and that might be ok if you could plan it, but with not knowing when you need to travel until a few days before you have to go (due to scans and blood tests) this stretch of the journey isn’t going to be an easy trip to plan.  I am hoping that things might ease a little before I have to travel as travel restrictions seem to be changing day by day. 

So here I am, end of May and waiting for my period to arrive in the next few days.  At the beginning of this month I had to start taking the birth control pill, aspirin and a pre-natal vitamin.  You are probably wondering why I have to take the birth control pill!  I never thought that was something I was going to have to take again!  I have to take it the month before treatment because I need to make sure at the end of the month I have a period and as my period’s have become very infrequent to almost nonexistent over the past 12 months (early onset menopause! – a whole other chapter) this was a way to make sure my period did come.  Let me take a slight detour and talk about this ‘other chapter’ for a minute…..

Thyroid Tumor

Just before lockdown started around the world (March 2020, I decided to go and see my gynecologist in the UAE for a checkup as I was just feeling a little off and not myself.  If felt that my hormones were out of whack and I wasn’t sure if I should go and see my regular gynecologist ‘Dr Trump’ or I should go and see an endocrinologist.  I had never seen an endocrinologist, so I decided to go and see one but in the same hospital where my gynecologist practiced medicine.   

I walked into my appointment with the endocrinologist not really sure what to expect, but what happened next I certainly didn’t expect. She took one look at me and said ‘you are Dr Trump’s patient aren’t you?’  As I was confirming her question and about to explain that I wasn’t sure if I should have gone to see Dr Trump, or her as an endocrinologist, she told me that Dr Trump a healthy 48 year old, had passed away from respiratory problems a few days earlier!…. was it covid I thought, we were just in the early days of covid and no one really new but I could tell this doctor was visibly saddened by having to share this news with me.  I too was very shocked and sad.  Dr Trump had been one of my big cheerleaders on this journey and she was gone, so suddenly and way too early in her life.  This curve ball I definitely didn’t expect.

This doctor’s visit went from sad to worse….. after some blood tests and an ultrasound of my Thyroid it was declared that I had two tumors on my Thyroid and they needed to be biopsied asap to ensure they weren’t cancerous!  Of course I quickly sought a second opinion, was this why I had been feeling so out of sorts?  It was confirmed by a second clinic and doctor that yes these two masses on my Thyroid did indeed seem problematic and needed to be biopsied, but as the world started to go into lockdown and hospitals stopped taking non-essential procedures I struggled to find a hospital that would perform the biopsy as most hospitals were only accepting critical treatment and this wasn’t deemed critical.  I went back to the hospital, who had found the tumors initially and thankfully they managed to fit me in later that week for the biopsy, the day before full lockdown took effect.

The biopsies were performed under local anesthetic.  One was relatively simple the other was not.  They had to enter my thyroid three times to get the sample they needed so rather than two holes in my neck I had four! Not pleasant.  Especially as I had to get a taxi home alone and spend the next seven days in full lockdown on my own waiting for my results thinking about every possible worst case scenario – obviously.  This is exactly when NOT to google things!

They say what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger and I have to say this was a low point for me….. not really the alone part, that part I am quite good at, but the time I had alone to think about how badly this could go, I did learn however that if there is any type of cancer to get Thyroid cancer is one of the better ones!

Thankfully seven days after my biopsy the doctor called me to confirm that both tumors were thankfully benign and I didn’t have Thyroid cancer!  I hadn’t however got to the bottom of what was making me feel so average and why my hormones were off but I did at least have the relief that I didn’t have cancer!

I put lockdown to good use. I thought if I can’t get to a doctor to find out what on earth is going on with my body then I will at least do all I can to try and get it back in shape and feeling healthy.  I walked up and down 32 flights of stairs inside the building where my apartment was located every day.  I drank 16 oz of freshly squeezed celery juice every morning, I used my terrace area to exercise every day and I almost completely cut sugar and alcohol from my diet.

A few months of lockdown later and I was feeling a lot better, still not wonderful but definitely on the right path.  I had signed up for this hormone/wellness virtual seminar.  I had decided that knowledge really was power and if I understood what was going on with my body then maybe I would start feel better and diagnose what was causing me to feel so ‘off’.  I had to go and get a blood test done where they tested for SO many things, all hormones, vitamin deficiencies etc and then you took your results to this virtual seminar where these doctors talked through what having high/low levels of various things could mean.  It was fascinating!  The things that were most ‘off’ for me were my cortisol was really high, testosterone very low and FSH really high.  Now I knew about FSH from my egg freezing days and I had suspected that I was maybe in peri-menopause but nothing had been confirmed.  

During the seminar we got onto the Q and A section and I didn’t hold back, I needed answers.  I told them my results and all three doctors immediately said ‘menopause – you need to try bio-identical hormones.  We don’t know if the UAE has them but if they do try them’

Bio-identical Hormones

After some google research and discussions with a friend who had used bio-identical hormones in the UK I thought this was definitely worth a try.  I managed to find a doctor that specialized in them in the UAE.  They are a form of Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT) but because they use a compound pharmacy for the medication it is produced to match what your specific body needs and it is more natural than synthetic HRT. 

After two months taking bio-identical hormones I felt wonderful.  With a strict diet and good exercise I managed to lose the weight I had been struggling to loose and finally I started to feel more balanced, my sleep was better and I just started to feel more myself.  I knew that when it came to being able to start my ‘having a baby’ journey again (when the world opened back up) that I was going to need to stop taking these bio-identical hormones, but for now they were helping me feel balanced and that is exactly what I needed so whilst the world was grounded due to covid I was just going to ride the wave until things opened up again.