March 23, 2013

To eat chocolates and macaroons with delight instead of guilt and view them as the amazing treats they were meant to be instead of sugar bombs in elaborate disguise, paving the way to metabolic syndrome, is bliss!

Energy wise I felt great these days, so thyroid may have functioned alright.

Unfortunately, others things continued to go wrong...

The following is a pathetic attempt to play Dr. House with my own symptoms.

So I am on my third round of antibiotics in the past five weeks for excruciating ear pain. Ampicillin, Spyramicin, now Amoxicillin. My gut will be squeaky clean when I'm done.

I have come to dread this ear infection or whatever it is -- what if it will never go away? It subsides with each treatment, than returns with a vengeance! Yesterday my doctor saw me at 8:30 PM -- she sometimes works incredibly late... I felt like my left ear was taken over by a nasty inflammation and "something" was pushing into my eardrum. I hope no harm will come to my sense of hearing over this.

She said she saw some awful red patches in my left ear canal. Besides the antibiotic, she prescribed an antiinflammatory based on niflumic acid, Nifluril. Never heard of it before. And Omeprazole to protect my stomach from the NSAID.

The fact that this ear infection/lymph node inflammation started when I did my progesterone, then my pregnenolone experiment may be just a coincidence. But it is worth investigating.

I found out from a doctoral thesis by Rusana Simonoska from the Karolinska Institute that the ear contains tons of estrogen receptors.

So, progesterone and pregnenolone may have turned into estrogen in my case -- there is proof of that even in my recent blood test results -- but then again, estrogen keeps fluctuating and it is hard to gauge its evolution in time for women before menopause. Peat argues that it is difficult anyway, being that when estrogen enters cells, its presence in the body may be higher, while in serum it will appear lower. So maybe what happened was simply that estrogen was ousted from cells into the bloodstream, under the influence of progesterone.

How would that translate at the ear level?

Either a loss, or a spike in estrogen occured at the cellular level.

Estrogen leaving the ear seems to break havoc, as in causing hearing diminution or even loss. But I did not see reports of aches and pains or inflammation accompanying that. Probably because the research I refer to was done on lab rats (I liked the author's compassionate words about them, at the end of her thesis).

The symptoms of an estrogen surge into the ear were likewise undocumented. Rats don't fill in questionnaires before decapitation, I guess.

Finally, research is not available on progesterone entering the ear system, I will further have to speculate and start using, like Dr. Peat, lots of "I would not be surprised if", "It is likely/possible that..."

So what happened there? This wannabe Dr. House is staring thoughtfully at her tablet, ears pounding inside her head. She gobbles another Nifluril with her coffee, then a bunch of Anatablocs, for added dramatic effect and sweet taste, if nothing else...

"Any ideas?"