Ageless: The Naked Truth About Bioidentical Hormones (47 page)

WF:
It made everything difficult. It made life difficult. I would toss and turn. My husband and I bought different beds. I went through three different beds because we thought I must be sleeping on the wrong bed. My poor husband was beside himself. “How could you be in this much pain?” he would ask. “What’s wrong with you?” I had no clue. My uncle was head of internal medicine at Montefiore Medical Center in New York City. He sent me to high-end Fifth Avenue doctors, but they all kept telling me that because I had so much mobility, it must be in my head. This all started at age forty. Well, come to find out ten years later, it was more than a back issue. Along the way, though, I kept saying to my husband that I have to keep trying, that there must be something seriously wrong with me, and that they just don’t know what it is.

Then I decided to go holistic. I started massage and acupuncture, which actually helped me tremendously, but only for a short while. Then I became convinced that it was my posture. I’ve worn high heels my whole life. I probably have not developed certain muscles, and
maybe if I go and take the Alexander Technique (which dancers do), it will help my posture and I will get better.

The woman who taught the class recommended craniosacral therapy. I was open to anything. She put me on the table and told me that this type of therapy is the transfer of energy. “I’m going to relax all the muscles in your body,” she said, “and I’m not even going to touch you.” I thought to myself, Voodoo, but I was ready to try anything. Within ten minutes, I was drenched. She continued, “You have all this tension and stress in your head and shoulders, but it’s calming you now. It’s leaving.” I walked out of there like a gazelle. I felt like a million bucks.

So I thought it was great. I’m a high-stress person, so I just need to calm down. At eighty bucks a pop, I couldn’t afford that therapy every week.

SS:
Along the way, with all this pain, were there any other symptoms of menopause such as depression or irritability?

WF:
I was incredibly irritable and angry, although I’m a very happy person by nature. My husband, unfortunately, was the one who took the brunt. All day long, I would hold it in, but then at night I would take it out on him. But he kept saying, “We’re going to find a solution.” He knows me so well, and he knows that I am not a person who complains. I decided that I would live with this, and at this point, it was only two years. But I was now approaching fifty, and this had been going on for almost ten years.

Then we moved to the California desert, and I saw a building that said “Sports Medicine.” I went in, after being in so much pain and not sleeping for so long. The doctor told me that my body was so inflamed. “If I don’t give you some type of injection to get the inflammation down,” he said, “I can’t even work with you.” I couldn’t sit, I couldn’t stand, I couldn’t lie down—nothing. I was just a mess. I got epidurals and cortisone injections and then every kind of injection known to man.

SS:
Are you talking about steroids?

WF:
Definitely steroids. I was scared to death. This doctor wanted to inject my neck and lower back. I let him because I didn’t know what else to do.

SS:
What was your diet like at this time?

WF:
At this point, I had been a vegetarian for ten years. I thought my diet was stellar. I thought I was never putting any chemicals in my body because I did read labels. I had sweets, but never as a daily occurrence. I drank a little bit of wine. I didn’t smoke. I didn’t drink sodas. I had coffee, but very little.

When it came to diet and exercise, I was in the zone, doing everything right. The doctors would confirm this, telling me, “You are so healthy. Your blood work is healthy. You eat right. There’s nothing wrong with you, so it must all be in your head.”

I’m not just saying this, but the first time I ever heard about hormones was four years ago. Prior to meeting you at a party, a friend of mine recommended a more forward-thinking doctor to me. I went for a physical, and she was the one who said, “Your blood work shows that you are nutritionally starving yourself. This is part of your fatigue problem. I don’t know if you’re a vegetarian for animal rights, for religious reasons, or whatever, but if these are not your reasons, I really recommend that you eat more protein.” I countered by telling her that I ate a lot of soy, but she said it wasn’t good for me.

That very night, my husband and I changed our diets (he was a vegetarian only because of me). We hadn’t eaten meat in fourteen years. The doctor said I might get sick at first when I introduced these things into my system, so do it slowly. She advised that we start with eggs and a little bit of butter and see what happens. I immediately got sick. My stomach was killing me. She told me to go to the health food store and take enzymes while introducing these foods into my system, very, very, slowly, and drink lots of water. In a few days, I was eating eggs. Next, I was eating chicken. Then the doctor told me to get off the pill, which I had been on for seventeen years. She explained how my diet, my lifestyle habits, and the pill could be contributing to my back pain.

She also asked me if I had ever heard of Dr. Diana Schwarzbein. I then read Dr. Schwarzbein’s book
The Schwarzbein Principle
and changed my diet. At my chiropractor’s office one day, I noticed a flyer saying that Dr. Schwarzbein was going to give a seminar here. So I went to the seminar. Dr. Schwarzbein talked about vegetarians, who
think they are so healthy, but in reality they’re wreaking havoc on their whole systems.

SS:
Yes—their bodies can’t make healthy cells because they are not giving them the building blocks through correct foods.

WF:
Then I met you at a party. By then I was already eating the Schwarzbein way and started feeling a little better. I was thrilled to hear you talking about Diana, and that’s when I moved closer to the group. You were talking about hormones, and I thought, Okay—now this is my next step to feeling even better! At that point, since I was getting little help from the medical community, I was trying to be my own doctor. You were also talking about the importance of sleep, but I still did not think this related at all to my problems.

Prior to going to Diana’s seminar, I did saliva testing through the mail. Anyone at the seminar who was tested she met with individually. That’s when she told me to get off the pill and how my diet and the pill could be contributing to my pain. At this point, I had still not made the connection that since birth control pills were synthetic hormones, they were putting my hormonal system out of balance! I did get an appointment to see Dr. Schwarzbein.

SS:
Did you get the feeling you were in the presence of great wisdom when you were with her?

WF:
I was blown away. At her seminar, I don’t think I ever closed my mouth. If you have any sense of wanting to get healthy, you immediately click with her. She just makes sense. Lights went off in my head. Now I know why I’m hungry all the time. Now I know why I crave sugar like a maniac and why I fight constantly to not eat it, although I was eating it without realizing it, because I was on such a high-carbohydrate diet. I didn’t realize that it all was turning to sugar.

SS:
What was your weight like during this time?

WF:
I always battled ten pounds. I was always starving myself because I needed to fit into something, so I would agonize over every morsel of food. I would gain weight, but it was more like I was bloating up because my hormones were so out of whack. The doctor then told me to stay on this path of eating because it’s going to take a long time for the pill to get out of my system and to counteract all the years I had been a vegetarian. She said that it would take a good year
for my system to really start acting the way I wanted it to. She also said, “Now don’t get crazy if you gain a few pounds. This is normal, but one day, you’ll wake up and wonder where it went.” I probably gained about seven pounds, but I kept with it. I was eating three meals a day and snacking. I was just eating and eating.

SS:
And you were making sure that you got protein, fat, and carbohydrates at every meal?

WF:
Yes. I was so used to starving myself to stay fit that I never realized that this was not going to keep me thin. Then I read your first diet book,
Eat Great, Lose Weight
, in which you said exactly what Dr. Schwarzbein was saying, plus you listed all this great food we could eat.

SS:
What was your libido like during this time?

WF:
You know, my husband and I always had a great sex life, but when I was sick, I just didn’t want to make love. My body hurt too much to be touched; my skin was crawling and in pain.

Month after month, my period came like clockwork, and then eight months into the program, my period was late. I called Dr. Schwarzbein’s office, and they told me that she was no longer taking patients, that she was now only training doctors. I thought, Oh no!

I went out and bought
The Sexy Years
, and it was the book that saved my life. It had been nine months since I had seen Dr. Schwarzbein, and suddenly my small pants fit me again. My back was still hurting, but I did have more energy. This was all so encouraging. I was losing the weight by eating all this food. Dr. Schwarzbein had already told me it was going to take a year for the pill to get out of my system and for me to heal my metabolism. All those years of eating incorrectly had put my hormones completely out of whack. But reading her book and then your books, I realized that the birth control pills were a big contributor to my being hormonally out of balance. Now with my late period, you were telling me that I needed to fix my hormonal system.

I pored over your book. My husband would walk into the room, and I would be crying. There are so many great doctors in your book, and I was thinking, Who do I turn to, what do I do?

Then I read the chapter on Dr. Galitzer. I don’t know why, but I
just gravitated to him. I think because you said a girlfriend of yours went to him for a chronic condition, and no one seemed to be able to help her but Dr. Galitzer.

SS:
Yes, he is my doctor, and he is a beautiful, kind, and brilliant person.

WF:
It was hard to get an appointment with him. But finally I did. I walked in with my whole history all typed out. He said, “Wendy, this is all great, but we’re not going to dwell on the negatives. We’re going to move forward.”

SS:
Dr. Galitzer is a very positive person. He is an endocrinologist who deals in energy medicine. He identifies the weakest elements in your body, strengthens it, and gives it energy. It’s quite amazing. Rarely does he do this with drugs.

WF:
The first thing he said to me was, “Wendy, you have a thyroid problem. What you’re complaining of is chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, and overall body pain. You have trouble sleeping. You have trouble focusing, and you have absolutely no libido.” I said, “Yes, and all of this makes me very irritable, unhappy, and I just feel awful all the time.” When I left his office that first time, I felt excited.

The next thing he explained to me was that everyone has a dominant hormone in their makeup. “You have one system that basically maximizes and processes all your energy. You happen to be an adrenal type, and your adrenals are not functioning well. That’s why you are not feeling so terrific, but we’re going to take care of that. We’re going to boost your adrenals, and bring your thyroid back to normal. You’re going to feel great. Also, we’re going to clean out your liver and detoxify.” He gave me tinctures, vitamins, and drops to start detoxifying my liver. I felt so comfortable in his presence that I believed him and decided I would do what he advised. One month later, when I went back to him, I was a completely different person.

SS:
The initial reaction to detoxification is a little uncomfortable, right?

WF:
Yes, but I believed in it. He was detoxing my sluggish liver. I had an underactive thyroid. I had acidity in my cells, and my adrenals were not functioning. I explained to him that my body ached from
head to toe, like I was disintegrating. He told me that I was just toxic, but that I’d be amazed at how quickly I would start feeling better.

He gave me Wobenzym enzymes for the inflammation in my body. He had me drinking Japanese water with lemon every morning before I did my tinctures. He gave me the hormones pregnenolone and DHEA, which were both to help my adrenal fatigue. I knew from your book that these were minor hormones and that they were going to improve my memory. He also had me using glutathione cream for my immune system. I started cross-referencing with what he was saying to the information in your book. I kept thinking, What do women do who don’t have access to this kind of medicine? I finally realized that it is up to each of us to get this information and then read and reread it until we understand it.

SS:
That’s how I learned it. We are the first line of defense. We are the generation of women who have got to figure this out on our own. We have to find the doctors who understand, and sometimes that takes time. Not all doctors are like Dr. Galitzer, or Dr. Schwarzbein, or the others that I write about.

WF:
My friends started noticing a huge difference in me. For the first three weeks, I was pretty uncomfortable, like there was a war going on inside me. But I could feel that something good was going on inside my body. By week four, the pain was leaving. My ankles and knees were not killing me. My back was still hurting, but all the other inflammation in my body had subsided. I was starting to feel more energy. I still am not ready to join the circus, but I am definitely feeling better.

Dr. Galitzer gave me adrenal shots, a vitamin C drip, more tinctures, and more vitamins. My acidity had gone down. He said there had definitely been a virus in my system, and that it was attacking my liver and my thyroid, and we needed to get it out.