How to be Diagnosed with PCOS
Everyone who is sick wants to know what is the issue. We want to hear to most reliving sentence “We diagnosed you with …”. But as many of you know, that is sometimes more difficult than the sickness in itself. If we don’t find out what is the issue we can not do anything to get better. We just have to sit, wait and live with our symptoms. And to be diagnosed with PCOS can take a while as many doctors are not familiar with that topic at all. It took my doctors 10 years to figure out what I have. Most of them always told me that I am completely healthy. No matter what I told my Doctors, they never took me serious. They just ignored my complaints. But I knew something was wrong with me for years.
To be officially diagnosed with PCOS, you officially have to have two out of the three following criteria:
No/or infrequent ovulations
high levels of androgens
polycystic ovaries on ultrasound
To be diagnosed, you need to get an ultra sound and a blood test for your hormone levels. But after you already know about all the symptoms you can imagine how difficult it is for doctors to filter all those symptoms and find the route in PCOS. And sometimes you don’t even fit in those two mentioned criteria but you still have PCOS.
A few weeks before I got diagnosed with PCOS, I knew something was wrong with me. I always have had health issues almost since I am born and it became worse in my youth (looking backwards that makes sense, as my hormone levels changed and PCOS could evolve). But the last month before the diagnosis, I realised, that I gained weight no matter how healthy I lived or how much sport I did, my mental ups and downs before my menstruations became worse and during sport I just felt awful. At night, I was suffering from sleep apnea (can also be a symptom of PCOS) and I was constantly tired. Besides difficulties to get pregnant, as I was not trying to get pregnant, I had all the above mentioned symptoms.
And just because my gynecologist suddenly retired, I had to find a new one. And this was my lucky day: after I sat down in front of my new gynecologist, I told her about a few issues I have, like late period, strong pain before and during the period, weight gain etc. And she did not even had to hear more and immediately said: sounds like PCOS. She made an ultra sound test and there it was: Cysts all over my Ovaries. It was the most reliving but also one of the hardest and confusing days in the last 10 years.
So what does it take?
So what does it take, to be finally diagnosed with PCOS? It needs you. You are the one with the symptoms. You are the only one who really knows what you suffer from and you are the only one that can get loud enough until you are heard. And you have to know what are you talking about. You have to be aware about PCOS. Then only when you mention it, your doctor might take you serious. And if your doctor does not want to listen to you, you can find many other options to get diagnosed: try a different doctor, ask other women with PCOS online about their doctors, track your symptoms, ask for an ultra sound test of your ovaries etc.
One of the things I learned through out my PCOS journey is: I have to ask for tests, I have to know everything about my sickness to prove my doctor that I am serious and I have to be the one in charge. Cause it’s my body. No one else will do that for me. Because no one else cares more about my health than myself.
And yes, sometimes it requires patience, endurance, perseverance and willpower. But you will need those attributes anyways to get better. And you are worth it. You owe that to yourself, your Partner, your Family and Friends who don’t want to see you suffer anymore. And you owe that to your future. Then only if you take care of PCOS you will get better.
