Anxiety and Progesterone
| Don't blindly
trust your doctors if you feel their medications or advice aren't
working. Find someone who understands hormones. |
I woke up on on 10/6/03 with anxiety, and it continued every morning
for almost six months. By afternoon I felt better and my evenings were
pretty good. The anxiety got worse before it got better. I felt physically
ill, lost weight, and had trouble sleeping.
It wasn't until I started getting hot flashes, night sweats, and horrible
PMS (tense/emotional attacks) that I realized what was happening to me:
I was in perimenopause and probably having cyclical progesterone crashes
every day. Another way of putting it is estrogen dominance.
When I was five months postpartum, I also experienced the same thing,
but it only lasted for four weeks until my next cycle. My GYN has been
useless: everything he gave me made me feel worse!! They put me on birth
control pills, then Zoloft, then Paxil. I then went on Buspar for the
anxiety and stopped everything else. I started not to trust the GYN any
more.
It wasn't until my family doctor sent me to a compounding pharmacy that
I started to feel better. To make a long story short, I am on a pharmaceutical-grade
progesterone cream three weeks of each month. I massage 1/4 teaspoon into
my skin and I feel SO much better. I am tapering off the Buspar.
I have felt so frustrated and angry with my GYN who told me to go to
a psychiatrist and psychologist. I was told I had anxiety disorder. My
GYN told me I was having panic attacks. Another psychologist said I had
obsessive-compulsive disorder.
Ladies, learn to listen to your bodies. Don't blindly trust your doctors
if you feel their medications or advice aren't working. Find someone who
understands hormones. My next step, if I weren't starting to feel better,
would be to see a reproductive endocrinologist.
I hope my story helps someone out there.
Andrea
in Pennsylvania
<sedss@msn.com>
For more information about progesterone and/or Anxiety:
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