Medical Good News/Bad News

I saw my doctor today - my PCP.  As per usual, it was a lengthy appointment (about 90 minutes).  This is because she's the hub of all of my medical information.  While I have several specialists, she keeps COPIOUS track of what each of them is doing, what the latest info she has is from each of them, if I have anything more recent, when I'll be seeing that doctor next (and why, what we hope to accomplish, etc.), and then, of course, we finally get to the actual exam, which usually brings up discussion of my most recent labs, action plan, blah blah blah.

And this time was even more because I had to catch her up on my newest specialist - my allergist.  I gave her the list of my allergies, and I asked her a question about one of my new meds that I was too embarrassed to call the allergist to ask.  Dr. Font answered that and explained her answer (I love doctors who don't just give an answer, but also give patients credit for being intelligent enough to understand processes).

Now, the good news is that all the hard word I've been doing with diet, my oral diabetes meds, and exercising has been paying off.  My hA1C went down by a statistically significant amount!  It's still high enough that I'm considered in the pre-diabetes range, but it went down, which is GOOD NEWS.  (She had even put a smiley face on the lab report she sent me a couple of weeks ago.  But I didn't want to post about it until I got the official word today.)  I need to keep up the work and we'll see what happens in another few months.

The bad news - well.  This one is complicated.  If you follow me on Twitter, you know I mentioned a bit ago that I didn't get my last period.  It seems that my thyroid is acting up again.  I knew this when my labs came back a few weeks ago (my lab sends the results directly to me, as well as to my doctor, who then puts any notes on the report and sends me clean office copy), but I've also been symptomatic - such as missing menstrual cycles.  The problem is that the dosage of Synthroid (synthetic thyroid hormone) I'm on now is 75 mcg, and the next level is 50 mcg, which is a big jump (at least in thyroid-ese).  So if my endocrinologist decides to lower my dosage, she might decide to do something like 75 mcg four days a week and 50 mcg three days a week.  But my PCP said sometimes patients end up feeling worse on a day-to-day basis on those schedules even though their thyroid levels improve.  The current plan is to retest my levels late May and see what my endo wants to do when I see her in June (if she doesn't want to adjust before then).

ALSO, since I'm on Seasonale (so I only get a period every three months anyway), they may want me to either stop the pill completely or go back to a monthly pill to see how often I'm actually getting my periods (the thought being that if I weren't on the Seasonale, I may have actually missed more).  BOOOO!