Dawn’s Story. Part #1 “Angioedema”
Angioedema. Just take a minute to google the word and look at the images that come up. WARNING: not for the faint of heart or for those with weak stomachs! Go ahead, I’ll wait for you. You’re back? Scary, huh? Now you know where I’m coming from because I have experienced multiple instances of angioedema over that past two years. Two of them were severe enough to land me in the emergency room. When you wake up at three AM with a bottom lip that belongs in a Star Wars movie and the last instance involved a swelling tongue, you begin to worry about a blocked airway and you get yourself to the emergency room stat. Plus, my husband’s reaction when I woke him up didn’t do anything to ease my mind!
I have worked with an allergist and an endocrinologist (did I mention that I also have Hashimoto’s Hypothyroidism? Another thing you can google) and one doctor (endocrinologist) just sort of shrugged his shoulders at me. Yes, I need a new endocrinologist. And the other (allergist) was certainly sympathetic and did his best to identify a trigger (lots of blood work and skin tests). In the end, I was taking two antihistamines twice a day and avoiding ibuprofen and naproxen sodium. I don’t want to take a lot of pills every day (this is kind of funny because wait until you see the number of pills I am taking daily now!) so I like to take myself off of the antihistamines, but every time I do that….yes, you guessed it, ANGIOEDEMA!
My mother has been working with Dr. Donaldson and raves about her all the time. She constantly sends me information on things like leaky guts and talks to me about the brain fog that comes with Hashimoto’s. So I figured, I’d give this a try. I don’t know if I have a leaky gut or a foggy brain, but I’d like figure out what’s going on with my body and fix it instead of chalking it up to perimenopause (the catch all for what ails women in their 40s) and never have an angioedema episode again. So my journey has begun. I use the word journey intentionally because apparently this is not a quick fix. Today is day 25 of what Dr. Donaldson said would take six months. Here we go.
Dawn