Dealing with Post Pill Amenorrhea

Hi and happy Monday to you! I hope you had a lovely weekend.

I didn’t know if I was going to do a full post about dealing with post-pill amenorrhea. Especially since I many of you come here for recipes, but this blog is really about health and for women our cycle is a great indicator of our health. Plus, I know from previous comments that there are others out there struggling with similar issues so I wanted to share. If you’re here for the recipes and workouts, simply skip this post. I’ll be back tomorrow with a recipe for ya!

So here’s the story — as I mentioned here and here, I’ve been dealing with post pill amenorrhea since going off birth control pills last September. If you’re unfamiliar, amenorrhea is the absence of menstruation. It can be brought on by a variety of things. Pregnancy, breastfeeding and menopause are all natural and normal reasons. However, it can also happen due to medications, contraceptives, lifestyle factors or other complications.

No period, no worries?

At first I wasn’t really concerned about experiencing amenorrhea after coming off birth control pills. I’d heard (and read online) that it can take a while for your body to adjust. After the holidays and three months without anything I started to get a little worried and decided to make an appointment with my gynecologist. I could tell she was kind of annoyed with me for just going off them without asking. Isaac and I weren’t trying to conceive — I just wanted to be more natural and stop putting the hormones in my body. Plus, I knew that in the next couple years we would likely want to start a family. She had me take a pregnancy test (negative) and then gave me a pack of birth control pills to take “just to see if I could jumpstart things.” I left the office with the pills, but knew I wasn’t going to take them. From everything I’ve read, I knew that the pill wasn’t going to solve my issues. If anything, it would just mask them.

At this point I had already started seeing an acupuncturist every two weeks. He did his needle work, prescribed me a few supplements and made me feel relieved by saying that he sees women all the time with the same issues after coming off hormonal birth control. I trusted his advice and just kept moving forward, hoping that working with him would help.

I also started looking for a new gynecologist and booked an appointment. She had blood work ordered. My hormone levels looked okay, but she recommended doing the progestin challenge. I was hesitant since it was introducing more hormones but my acupuncturist thought I should try it (as did my sister and mother-in-law) so I did. Nothing happened. This typically means you either have low serum estradiol (estrogen), a dysfunction with the hypothalamic-pituitary axis, or a problem with the uterine outflow tract.

Hypothalamic amenorrhea diagnosis

Since the progestin challenge didn’t work I was referred to an endocrinologist (fertility specialist) and after looking over my blood work he diagnosed me with hypothalamic amenorrhea. Both my luteinising hormone (LH) and my follicle stimulating hormone (FSH) levels are low. I am producing some estrogen but not enough. He recommended I get an MRI of my brain to check for a pituitary tumor and an ultrasound to check for cysts (because I could have PCOS as well!), but his biggest piece of advice was to eat more, exercise less and work on removing stress from my life. <