Sleepless night.....

It was another sleepless night last night. I tried to go to bed at 10pm, and although I was tired and wanted to sleep, I couldn't fall asleep. I tossed and turned, flipped and flopped and looked at the clock about every half hour all night. I hate these kind of nights! I have been dealing with these since the surgery. I no longer sleep well, and it will build until I get to the point that I am so exhausted that I will finally sleep, the problem is it usually means that it comes to a day and I end up sleeping all day and night. This is not a good cycle.

After the whole doctor changed happened, the new doctor did a FULL blood workup, and I mean she really tested everything, we found that my cortisol levels were no normal, meaning I was really stressed by this, and that my magnesium levels were low, which can effect sleep. There were other hormone levels that needed addressed and finally I am on medication for those, and they are making a difference, but it still needs tweaked.

I guess this means that I should go ahead and call the doctors office and look into tweaking the medications, especially since the sleeplessness is causing me to be irritable and short with the kids.

I have been reading a book called, "It's My Ovaries, Stupid!", written by a doctor who has put her 25 years of research and what she sees in her practice into a book, explaining that hormones effect a whole lot more about our daily lives than we think. i just started the chapter on excitotoxins, and man is that a wake-up call.

Excitotoxins, or neurotoxicants are chemicals that cause damage or death to nerve cells. Basically, these chemicals stimulate such intense and rapid firing of the nerve endings that the cells run out of their chemical messengers, and then die a few hours later. The nerve cells in the hypothalamus, our master hormone regulator, are some of the neurons in our body most sensitive to this exciatory damage and death. So what are excitotoxins and where are they found, or more importantly how to avoid them? some of the excitotoxins are natural compounds that occur in plant and animals as amino acids: glutamate, aspartate and cysteine, which are the building blocks of proteins. Some are man-made chemicals and are even more potent. One is MSG, and MSG-induced damage to the brain has been studied and written about for at least 40 years!!

We all know that MSG is bad, but now I am learning that it is so much worse than I ever knew. Not only does it give you those headaches, it can cause over-eating and damage your reproductive organs! What?!?!? And yet most of the research on it is buried and not published. Did you know that MSG used to be added to baby food? Finally we wised up and got that banned, but msg baby food led to babies that were short in stature, obese and had difficulty reproducing as adults! So, now i am even more determined to keep MSG out of my diet, but what is worse is that now that people know about MSG, it has morphed into new additives that we don't recognize, so we are still getting the toxins just under a new name, such had hydrolyzed vegetable protein. Of course aspartate in the form of Nutrasweet is just as bad.

It's so hard to put what i am feeling into words without just copying the whole 440 page book!! I just keep looking at what is written and i am appealed and it makes so much sense in so many things that i have experienced in my life...what is up? how to counteract all this.

The book is "It's My Ovaries, stupid!" by Elizabeth Lee Vliet, MD. The copyright on it is 2003, but the book is hard to find, but Brad found excerpt of it online. she has two other books..."Screaming to Be Heard: Hormone Connections women Suspect and doctors Still ignore" and "Women, weight and hormones".