Pain, Pain, Go Away!

While much of the country is probably suffering through too much cortisol, I think I am finally making enough. I quit taking it a few days ago when my face started getting puffy, I gained a couple of pounds that wouldn't budge, and I noticed my heart beating a few times: those are clear signs of overdoing hydrocortisone. I'm feeling back to normal now and my face doesn't look like the Pillsbury dough boy.  What finally brought this about? It could be that about a month ago, I really started cleaning up my diet. I haven't been perfect, but I stopped going out for lunch at work and getting anything from the deli except meat, cheese and roast chickens. I stopped buying chocolate chips under the pretense of making low-carb cookies. I also bumped up my kelp tablets to four per day and added L. casei shirota bacteria to my yogurt. After some five years, when I went through an incredible amount of stress with parents, relatives who were worse than useless in helping with thei...

I had a pleasant surprise when I got out the sawzall today to finish repairs on the front door. Not the way it cut the new door sweep--I probably should have used the jigsaw. It was how easy it was to put the blade in. You have to turn a part on the saw, which I could barely do two months ago when I had nails to cut off . Today--probably thanks to spending my spare time since August working saws, sanders and paintbrushes--it was no harder than turning a knob on the stove.  So I've built up some strength in my hands and probably elsewhere, but my adrenals aren't keeping up with cortisol production. After a day's work (well, three or four hours, to be honest), my neck, back, jaws, and sinuses all hurt and they don't feel better until use a dab of hydrocortisone. Other pain relievers don't help much. This isn't normal muscle stiffness--the kind you get from working out--it feels like I'm inflamed. Last weekend in particular, after a flu shot and a few days of p...

I stopped taking all thyroid medicine, and now just use a little bit of hydrocortisone now and then. I think I've always run low on it, and a little bit helps with aches and pains I'm now incurring since I feel 45 again--back when I had the energy I should have had in my 20s.  I've been working on my garage, which needed so much work I asked a handyman what it would cost to replace it. (Too much--like what they wanted to re-side it). I decided to fix it myself. Work was slow-going at first since I didn't have any energy in the morning and afternoons were too hot to work. But last week I turned a corner. A boarded-up window was rotted and I thought that as long as I had to do repairs, I might as well put in a window. Browsing online, I fell in love with a small, inexpensive vinyl double-hung and had to have it.  You never know what will inspire you. Most window installation videos show nice, neat jobs that don't require retrofitting, or unusual situations. I have a v...

I've joined the quarantined masses, having caught cold with a cough a few days ago. Is it the coronavirus? I don't know. Tests are being rationed and my request was denied. The only thing I'm taking is Umcka cold care. Yesterday, pre-quarantine, I saw I needed more--and you have to start taking it immediately after the start of symptoms for it to work. I ordered a box online and picked it up at the store, where the cashier put it in my trunk while I stayed in my car. I even wore a scarf I could put over my face in case I had to leave my car. After getting home, I tried to get a test. In Indiana, you need a doctor's order to get one, so I called the urgent care center I went to for my bronchitis last year. After completing a questionnaire online and talking to technical support, then straightening out confusion over time zones, I had a teleconference with a nurse practitioner. He said that whether I had the coronavirus or just a cold, his advice was the same: stay h...

Several years ago, I tried intermittent fasting when it first became all the rage. Result? I was hungry all day and ended up binge eating that night. I'd been on a low-carb diet for quite a while. I now know that the problem was likely low cortisol. I've had symptoms of low cortisol all my life: allergies, wonky blood sugar, sinus infections, and recently, my three-month bout with bronchitis--in the summer. And I'm hypothyroid, a condition that tends to go hand-in-hand with low cortisol. Cortisol helps regulate blood sugar. Without enough cortisol you can get hypoglycemia; your liver won't make enough blood sugar. In other words, I need to eat breakfast, lunch and dinner. When I had a more stressful job, I also needed some snacks in between. Since about half of people with thyroid problems also have adrenal problems(1), and Syncrap (levothyroxine, a thyroid medication) is the second-most prescribed medication in the US(2), low cortisol must be a pretty common con...

Propublica says, "Doctors who received payments from the pharmaceutical industry prescribed drugs differently than their colleagues who didn’t. And the more money those doctors received, on average, the more brand-name medications they prescribed."That's the result of their investigation using a large database of doctors and the prescriptions they write. Good news, though: you can use ProPublica's database to find a doctor in your area (in the US) who prescribes T3. Many patients have a hard time finding a doctor who'll write a prescription for T3. T3's official name is Liothyronine. Go to the site , click on your state, sort by drug (click on "drug"), and scroll down to liothyronine, and click on it. You'll see some of the doctors in your state who prescribe T3.  Sad to say that the the most common prescriptions in the database are atorvastatin (a statin drug) and levothyroxine (syncrap).  In happier news, I'm fighting a cold-...

Things are continuing to improve. I've stopped taking my adrenal cortex medicine and digestive enzymes because I don't feel I need them. I'm now down to hydrocortisone cream and natural desiccated thyroid (NDT). I got some lab tests done the other day--I'm sure they'll show improvement. I couldn't take any hydrocortisone that day (and I forgot to take my NDT until that afternoon). I didn't take my vitamins or electrolytes, either. I ended up eating a whole can of chocolate covered nuts. And a small order of fries with my lettuce-wrapped burger. Cortisol helps control blood sugar; maybe it has something to do with controlling cravings, too. I went back to my supplement regimen the next day and felt no desire to eat fries or chocolate--just tacos. I had chicken, salsa, cheddar cheese, guacamole and pork rinds. Now that I'm feeling better, thinking more clearly and no longer desperate to get well, I took advantage of a slow day at work to look over cos...

I think I finally understand why I've had bronchitis off and on for months, why I had scary heart palpitations for years up until a few days ago, and why I couldn't fast or do well on keto/Atkins induction. The reason is adrenal fatigue. Some call it a made-up illness (there's no insurance code for it), but here are the results of my lab test for adrenal hormones: Green is optimal; my cortisol levels are mostly suboptimal. DHEA is in the tank. My adrenals are clearly at the low end. As Dr. William Jefferies put it, "Patients with mild adrenal deficiency describe wanting to do things but feeling too exhausted to undertake them..." The latter is exactly how I've felt for quite a while.  Cortisol, one of the adrenal hormones, helps you deal with inflammation and stress; it also helps regulate blood sugar, metabolism and immune responses. When my dog Molly died in 2017 and I started breaking out in hives at night, it was probably a lack of cortisol. Wh...