Yay…..Blood!
No, I haven’t gone all vampire yet, actually the opposite. Needle-hating me had to have *7* tubes taken out last week, my friendly phlebotomist whistled in awe and said I held the record of most tubes taken out of one patient. She was so kind and worried about me that she went across the hall to another doctor’s office and snitched a few doughnut holes for me, lest I pass out walking back to my office. Here, I decided the short term (not passing out and falling into traffic) overrode the long term (sugar, carbs, possible transfats) plus they were chocolate, you get the picture.
Anyway, my doc wanted to check to see how my immune markers were doing after three months of acupuncture, fish oil (a column on why this is good for you is coming), plus some other non invasive things, like baby aspirin, that he has me on, tailored to my specific immune profile. Some of my numbers were so “off” on my baseline test, he tried to put a nice spin on it, calling them “Olympian” and “record-breaking”. But now I’m happy to report I’m the Bode Miller of blood work–no gold medals here.
Some of my numbers have actually fallen to the high-but-almost normal range. I still have too many Natural Killer cells (NKs), which, it is surmised, is why whenever we conceive, it doesn’t last. Too many NKs aren’t good for anyone, either, they are related to rheumatoid arthritis, Alzheimer’s, and other inflammatory conditions, so it’s a good idea to get them down irrespective of pregnancy.
I kind of knew I had the NK thing going on (your NKs often become “stuck” on the “on” switch post partum) because I became deathly allergic to our beloved cat right after I had my son. Arthur the cat did find another loving home…but I broke out in a major case of hives even just visiting the place where his new adoptive family would get him.
The thing that scares me about all this is that the reproductive doctor my midwife sent me to was totally dismissive (as was my OB, who’d long been fired by me) of trying to normalize my immune problems. They all wanted to jump in and do the big (and $$$$) stuff, plus the painful endometrial biopsies, the Clomid (me and Barry Bonds), which, I suspect, wouldn’t have worked anyway because of my NK problems.
Since my father was a doctor, I’d always been raised with the Marcus Welby model, you don’t question your doctor, he’s (and it’s always he) the doctor. After I’d had my problem with the blighted ovum, I’d had a bunch of scary bleeding episodes for which my normal doctors also wanted to jump in with the big guns. Surgeons cut, that’s what they do. Baby aspirin is for wimps, right? How boring to pop some OTC pills and take a little fish oil, geez!
But like I said, a little baby aspirin, the Specific Carb diet, yoga, stress management, plus some other natural interventions (again: I caution that this baby aspirin regimen has been formulated specifically for me based on blood work) and I’m back to normal. It’s sort of like the poor people who get these ridiculous spinal fusion surgeries for back pain (that often don’t work) when acupuncture can often fix it successfully in just a few sessions.
So stay tuned. Another month, another blood work test, hopefully I’ll be less Olympian and more ordinary, blood-wise, at least.
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