PCOS: Diagnosis Incomplete

My primary care physician said yesterday that he feels "all signs are pointing" to a PCOS diagnosis. PCOS, poly-cystic ovarian syndrome, is the leading cause of infertility in the United States. Official estimates suggest 4 to 10 percent of women of child-bearing age have PCOS. That's a lot of women. Yet what we know about PCOS is limited. We don't know the cause or how to prevent it. We don't know the full scope of the effects. We don't have a cure. It's not even really "manageable" because you cannot manage something you don't understand.

To be perfectly clear, even the diagnosis is a bit of a mystery. A number of symptoms + abnormal test results = diagnosis.

In my case, I'm not trying to get pregnant. I have 2 children, and I got pregnant with each of them in the first month my husband and I had decided to conceive. I don't have an overabundance of body hair in weird places - chest, toes, feet, back, face. Well, okay, I have 3 stray hairs on my chin, which have prompted many a "not by the hair on my chin-y chin chin" comments from my husband. One swipe of the razor, and they're gone.

I have not had a period in 11 months, however. Before that, I had a 4-month gap and before that a 6-month gap. Since I turned 30 this past May, it's unlikely I'm hitting menopause. Plus I have gained 60 pounds over the past 2 years for reasons no one understands. I get more sleep. I eat better and less. I exercise more. Nothing moves the scale toward zero. It just keeps creeping up, and one of the inexplicable things about PCOS is that there appears to be some relationship to weight. Does obesity cause PCOS? Does PCOS cause obesity? Are they intertwined parts of the same bit of genetic code? We just don't know.

My gynecologist ordered a plethora of tests 2 weeks ago and then said I needed to see our family doctor because my A1C was 6.4. For those of you unfamiliar with diabetes, an A1C test is a composite of your blood sugar rates over the course of two to three months. Normal is somewhere between 4.5 and 6, depending on the scale one consults. My doctor said he doesn't even think I qualify as "prediabetic," but I'm supposed to try to lose some weight. At least 25 pounds. Because that's easy.

I've made changes over the past 18 months to my life, and none has helped. My weight continues to increase, so my initial reaction was along the lines of "yeah, this will work."

Then last night I thought about it, and I decided that I'm going to find a way to manage the unmanageable. I'm going to determine how to live a full life with PCOS and not the sad, chubby existence that the literature all says is what I should anticipate.