There can be major physical changes and effects to a female’s body after having a child. In 2011 when I had my son the hospital gave me an epidural for the pain; they did the shot too high up on my back. As far as anyone knew I was fine. I showed no signs of problems until after I got out of the hospital, when I started having back spasms due to the fact that the epidural was done incorrectly. The female body goes through many natural changes; it prepares itself to be capable of having a child naturally and being capable of breastfeeding babies.
It can also cause other effects that are not necessarily normal changes to the female body, for me the two main changes that I had were being anemic and having a hyperthyroid. The doctors told me that I was anemic because I had lost too much blood during labor and that the hyperthyroid was a result of my body changing after having my son but that it was nothing to worry about. I had to have a blood transfusion before I could leave the hospital to get my blood count back up, I was still consider as being anemic.
Knowing that there can be a lot of risk in having a blood transfusion I originally told them that I would not do it, but the hospital told me if I did not do it that I would be in the hospital for at least another week. An overactive thyroid (hyperthyroid) overstimulates the metabolism and has severe effects on the sympathetic nervous system. It speeds up many of the body systems and can even resemble an overdose of adrenaline.
Some of the effects that I have gone through due to the hyperthyroid have been extreme weight loss but with an increased appetite, muscular weakness, sleep issues, irritability, an inability to deal with heat, anxiety, and delirium are just a few of the symptoms that I have had. The first thing I noticed was that I wasn’t capable of eating solid food but that I was hungry. So I started drinking at least 6 Ensures in a day but I was still losing weight at a fast rate, I had gone from two hundred pounds down to one hundred sixty pounds in less than two months.
I thought it was normal that I was just losing baby weight, when I went to my follow up doctor’s appointment I realized that my doctor was concerned about the amount of weight I had lost. He gave me a prescription of more Ensures with refills so that I would have enough for at least three months. With everything that had happened with the doctor that I had I refused to go back to him. So I went through all of the prescription that he had given me, thinking that I would have another doctor before I need a follow up appointment.
A couple months later I moved down to Delray Beach to attend school at Florida College of Natural Health in Pompano Beach, Florida. The changes that have happen to me since then have caused me to end up in the hospital twice for gallstones. In September 2012 I started having back spasms again and did not think anything about them until they became unbearable. I was in my Cranial Sacral Therapy class when I couldn’t bear the pain anymore, so I told my teacher about it thinking that it might just be a trigger point or something on my back.
He did not work on my back like I figured he was going to; instead he worked on my upper abdominals. I still do not know the exact technique he used but I do know that after a little bit of discomfort the pain was almost completely gone. He also told me that if the pain did come back that I need to see a doctor because he believed that there was probably something wrong with my gallbladder. The spasms came back about two months later, right before Thanksgiving before I made it to the appointment I had started vomiting excessively I was not capable of holding any food down.
The excessive vomiting caused vessels to burst so I was finding blood in my vomit, endlessly to say I went to the emergency room instead of waiting for the doctor’s appointment. After an x-ray and ultrasound later they told me that I had gallstones. The hospital gave me antibiotics and pain medicine then sent me home. Gallstone are normally created by eating a lot of fatty foods and describe as being a crystalline concretion formed by accretion of bile components, or put simply as fat and bile components coming together and crystalize into stones.
After I took the antibiotics I did not think that I need to worry about it again, I figured that the gallstones wouldn’t come back. So I did not give it as much as a second thought. The spasms did come back less than eight months later. It came faster than before no gradually getting worse just spasms than the next day almost being in tears because my pain levels had gone from a five to a ten overnight.
So I went into the hospital thinking that they would just give me antibiotics and I would be back home and have a couple days to rest before I had to go into work. This time wasn’t get sent home, instead I was admitted into the hospital because my gallstone had leaded me to get pancreatitis. The doctor told me that a gallstone had gotten stuck in the bile duct and the blockage lead to the pancreas becoming infected. She told me that my infection level was at the highest it could possibly be for acute pancreatitis and that I was going to be admitted into the hospital until the infection was gone.
It is my belief that the fact that I have a hyperthyroid triggered the gallstones, my body required more food because of the hyperthyroid but my gallbladder could not break down the fat quickly enough to prevent the gallstones. The goal is to have my gallbladder removed by the end of the month. * Which step—major revisions, editing, or proofreading—did you find easiest? * Which step hardest? * What have you learned about your writing by revising it?
* What are the areas for improvement you see in your writing? The step that I found to be the easiest was the editing. The hardest step for me was finding the right words to use. I learned that I tend to write a lot of run on sentences. There is always room for improvement. I know that I’m starting pretty much from scratch when it comes to writing or literature period because I was always taken out of the classes in school.