| My endometrial cancer was diagnosed when I was 46. By the time I was 26 my periods had reached the point where they might happen every 1-3 months. When I hit 26, they stopped -- I would go from 6 to 12 months without one, and then a period would start and I'd hemorrhage (literally), with clots and rarely cramps. My doctor at that time was concerned and put me on a double-dose of birth control pills to see if that would stop the bleeding. If it didn't in a day or two, he was going to do a D&C. The bleeding did stop, so I stayed on birth control pills to regulate my period. It helped but I became horribly depressed, so eventually I stopped taking them. A few years later I had another doctor, and the feast/famine thing was happening again. She put me on progesterone (Provera) this time -- 10 days out of the month. It made my periods start so the bleeding wouldn't be so bad. It did help, but I had problems with depression and horrendously sore boobies while I was on it. I'd do okay taking it for a while, but then I'd start forgetting and eventually I'd be off it again. This went on for several years. At one point in the mid-80s I had a period that lasted for 3 months, until I had a D&C. At that point my endometrium was apparently normal. By the mid-90s, I had to wear a pad all the time and keep a supply of tampons with me because I never knew when I was going to bleed (I was pretty much off the progesterone by then). I don't know that I was really having periods at that point -- I'd just start bleeding, it would last for anywhere from a couple of hours to over a week, and then it would stop. And it was heavy with huge clots. I had one episode in particular where I was overflowing the super-sized tampon plus filling a pad plus overflowing that plus passing clots bigger than the full tampon -- every 20-30 minutes! Several hours into this I called my primary care doc and was able to get in to see him pronto. He didn't do an exam but after checking whatever else he did (I don't recall now), he said he didn't think the bleeding was excessive and felt it would stop by morning. If it didn't, call him back and he'd give me a referral to my GYN. I wasn't happy with his decision, but since I'd had this problem before I decided to go home and wait it out. The bleeding did stop (completely stop!) that evening. I called my GYN the next day to ask if this amount of bleeding was excessive, and they said HELL YES!!! YOU CALL US NEXT TIME THAT HAPPENS!!!!! I had a problem remembering to take pills back in those days. I started my progesterone again but eventually started forgetting it. For a few more years I went through the feast/famine thing, until I was having too many problems when I went back to school. At that point (1997 maybe) I finally got in the habit of doing the progesterone like I was supposed to, and everything settled down. Well, until the spring of 1998 when my depression came back. A couple of months into it I noticed I would hit bottom toward the end of the 10-day cycle of progesterone and I'd come back up once my period started. I switched from Provera (synthetic progesterone) to Prometrium (natural progesterone) and that seemed to help; I still had the lows but not as badly. Starting in the fall of 1999 I noticed my periods were becoming lighter -- they were lasting less than a week and there wasn't as much flow. Eventually they were down to a few days, and a couple of times I didn't have one at all. In February and March of 2000 I started having night sweats. Putting that together with the lighter periods, I wondered if I was starting menopause, though I was 45 at the time and a bit young for it. I went back to see my friendly primary care doc (same guy; it's hard to find doctors around here who are accepting new patients). He agreed that I might be perimenopausal, so he ordered a couple of blood tests. They came back normal, so he ordered some stuff to make sure I didn't have an infection that was causing the sweats. That all came back normal, too. Because the hormones were "normal" he would not put me on hormone replacement, even for a trial. He said to see how things go for "a while" (which he defined as a couple of months when I asked how long that was), and if the sweats continued he'd give me a referral to my GYN. I gave it a month and then called for the referral because I wasn't getting enough sleep and was becoming rather bitchy and depressed. It took a couple of months to get in with my GYN, she started me on a low dose of Premarin around August 3rd. I started bleeding the next day and everyday for the rest of that month (getting heavier as time went on). Finally I was feeling so terrible I stopped both the estrogen and progesterone and made an appointment to see her; I was able to get in the next day. She was concerned that I was bleeding so much on such a small dose of estrogen, so she decided to do an endometrial biopsy while I was there just to make sure nothing was going on. That's how we found the cancer. Neither of us was expecting it, so I'm eternally grateful that she listened to her inner voice about doing the biopsy. My point of this whole thing is that if you're not comfortable with what's going on and feel like you're being blown off by the doctor, don't do what I did and go along with it. I've since been told that doing blood tests for menopause isn't usually accurate -- the hormone levels are fluctuating, so unless there are several levels drawn you don't get an accurate picture. If my doctor had been more aggressive in treating me and sent me to my GYN that day, I might have had a biopsy done at that point and it would have showed severe dysplasia, I'm sure (my gyn-onc said it had probably been present for several years before the cancer developed). The biopsy was somewhat uncomfortable (well, not somewhat -- it was uncomfortable), but I'd do it all over again if I had to, because it caught the cancer and saved my life. If you continue to have problems with the bleeding, talk to the doctor about doing an endometrial biopsy. It's the only way to catch problems early because endometrial cancer doesn't show up on Pap smears, and any continued episodes of abnormal bleeding should be investigated thoroughly. D_BAY 09/30/01 |
| Dbay's Story |
