6th Time's a Charm

So...as we learned in a previous post, I was "diagnosed" with PCOS about 4 years ago.  I use quotes because I found out last week that while it's likely that I have PCOS, I was improperly diagnosed.  I can't really say that I'm surprised by that though.  Last week I had a consultation with the endocrinologist that I was referred to.  He's the 6th doctor I've seen in the last four years, and he actually knows what he's talking about!

The consultation took about an hour and a half.  He was really attentive and explained everything to me in length using notes and diagrams (someone must have debriefed him on my personality prior to my arrival!), and we set up our plan of action as far as treatment goes.  The first part of treatment is officially diagnosing my disorder.  Previously, I was told that I had PCOS, but none of the other doctors bothered to actually go through the steps necessary to officially diagnose me.  In order to this, some unlucky phlebotomist is going to get to suck my blood.  That will happen in about a month after we've given my body some time to filter out the medication I was taking prior to my appointment last week.  Once the blood work is done and has been analyzed I'll start a new drug regimen and a new diet.

I'm mostly excited about having a diet that will work.  He created this diet with PCOS patients in mind (he's writing a book about it currently!), but says he's used it and he makes all of his friends use it as well.  He also said that every woman he's put on it who has stuck with it has lost all of the weight they needed to lose to be healthy again.  Also, he says the weight loss happens pretty quickly as well.  It will definitely be nice to not be carrying around all of this extra weight...both physically and mentally.

Overall, I'm so grateful to have been referred to this doctor.  So far I think he's amazing, and I'm excited to finally start getting everything worked out.  I'll keep you posted as I get more into everything.  Maybe when it's lab work time I'll treat you to the story of how I hate needles and phlebotomists hate me.  It should be a fun read!

What February 14th Means to Me...

For me, February 14th has nothing to do with roses and chocolates and over the top, absolutely ridiculous proclamations of "love."  However....my feelings towards Valentine's Day are for another, much different, post.  :)

So here's what actually happens on February 14th.  The state of Arizona turns another year older.  We became a state on February 14th, 1912.  Yes, that's right....that would mean today is Arizona's 100th Birthday!

Now I have to be honest.  Am I Arizona's biggest fan?  No.  I've spent most of my adult life thus far trying to get away from it.  There are two reasons for this.  First, I feel like everyone has a place.  Somewhere that is the embodiment of their personality.  Somewhere that you know when you're there that you're in the exact place that you should be.  For me, Arizona isn't that place.  Well, Phoenix isn't anyway, and that's where I spent the majority of my life.  I also think you can have more than one place (to date I think I have 5), but that's also another blog topic for another day.  Second....THE HEAT!  I mean really, I think the people who claim to love it when it's 120 degrees outside are lying.  It's awful, and it's not like you get a break from it when the sun goes down.  The high is 115 and the low is 112.  It's out of control and I HATE IT!  Give me humidity, cool evenings and lightning bugs over the oven-like feeling and lizards any day!

Arizona does have it's good points though.

• First point goes to Flagstaff.  I spent 4 years there attending Northern Arizona University, and it was the best choice I could have made for a school.  I got a great education, met amazing friends, had tons of fun and got to live somewhere so gorgeous for 4 years.  Located only 2 hours north of Phoenix it's located at an altitude of 7000 feet surrounded by the amazing San Francisco Peaks.  It's woodsy, it snows and the weather in the summer is mild and amazing.  I love everything about it (to the point where I have a hard time believing that it's actually part of Arizona), and if it were a slightly bigger city I might still be living there.  It's definitely one of my 5 places.
• Second point goes to the Grand Canyon.  Because it's awesome.  If you don't believe me...go there and see for yourself.
• Third point goes to the sunsets.  They're unlike any others I've seen.  It's likely because of all of the pollution, but if it gives me something pretty to look at on my way home I guess I'm okay with it.
• Fourth point goes to monsoon season.  My personal favorite part of the year in Arizona.  Lightning storms are amazing to watch, and it's really the only time of year we get any significant amount of rain in the desert.
• Fifth and final point goes to all of our spring training facilities.  It's great to be able to watch baseball games before the season even starts (speaking of which, even though I don't pay attention to much until hockey season is over...pitchers and catchers report in only 6 days!).

Long story short...while it may not be my favorite place in the world as a whole, Arizona will always have a special place in my heart.  My family is here.  It's where I was raised (point six would probably be it's a great place to raise a family).  It's home.  So while I don't plan on staying here forever...for now it's just fine.  

Now, this was a co-blog with mom, so head over her way to see her insights on our home state.  I know you'll enjoy what you read.  Happy Arizona's Birthday Everyone!

I Love to Cook

The title really says it all.  I love to cook.  I always have.  In my family, the love of cooking appears to have skipped a generation.  My younger sister and I both love to cook.  Our mom on the other hand, well, let's just say she doesn't share our joy.  That's not to say she's a bad cook, because she's not!  When she does cook, it always tastes wonderful.  If it didn't, we probably wouldn't have holiday dinners that pull in 30+ people every year (no joke, I think Christmas this year was an insane 35 people at one point!).  And with that, I give you the first mother/daughter co-blog.  Here's my story of how I came to love cooking, and please be sure to go read mom's post on how she doesn't love it.

I was a lucky kid growing up.  I had two amazing sets of grandparents that I spent a ton of time with.  Both of my grandmothers were amazing cooks, and I spent numerous hours in the kitchen with them.  First watching, and in awe of all of the amazing things they would always make.  Then I was old enough to help them cook, and that's when I gained an appreciation for cooking.  They both made everything from scratch and memory.  We all knew better than to ask for recipes, because they didn't exist. In fact they still don't exist, and now that they have both passed on I've tried my best to recreate some of the dishes they made.  Some of them have been successful (i.e. Nanny's potato salad), and some of them I've had to give up on because it will just never be the same (i.e Grandma's bean soup).

I was pretty young when they started having me help out in the kitchen.  I was a pretty great sous chef if I do say so myself!  I used to tear bread for stuffing, pick beans for soup and peel potatoes (Okay, so this one time I took a chunk out of my thumb with the potato peeler.  Don't worry, I was fine...but Nanny was more concerned with whether or not I had gotten blood on the potatoes than she was with the fact that I was now missing a piece of my thumb.  It's been my favorite scar ever since.).  They taught me the basics of cooking, and I'm forever grateful for that.

Now that I'm an adult, the kitchen is my happy place.  Well, the kitchen I picture myself having someday is my happy place.  My last two kitchens in DC and my parent's kitchen are sooooooooo small.  I need to picture the aforementioned dream kitchen in order to be able to cook in those kitchens without going a little crazy.  Once I get to the imaginary kitchen, I'm instantly calm.  Some people despise all of the prep work for cooking.  Slicing, dicing and grating....oh my!  I LOVE IT.  Doing all of the mundane prep work is cathartic.  Maybe it's the fact that you're usually stabbing or cutting something with a sharp knife, but once I start all of the stress from the day just melts away.  After that initial prep work to officially release the stress, I feel like nothing can go wrong from that point.  Usually, nothing does.  I have a pretty good track record for turning out tasty dishes.  Well, at least that's what I've been told, and I'm choosing to believe that no one's been lying to me!

My last year in DC was not the best for me.  Finances were the toughest they'd ever been, and work was slowly but surely killing a little piece of my soul (it sounds over dramatic, but unfortunately that's how it felt), but if I could end my night by cooking myself, and usually my roommate, a great meal, I felt like everything would be okay, and I could keep going for another day.  This feeling night after night eventually gave me my latest and greatest epiphany.  Culinary school.  Why not?  Cooking is one of two things in my life that I've consistently loved doing.  I can be a very indecisive person sometimes.  Not because I'm a flaky person, but because I get overly passionate about things very quickly, and it then takes me a while to realize that maybe whatever I'm passionate about at the moment isn't the right fit for me.  I dare someone to ask me how many times I considered changing my major in college.  Cooking though...it's always been a constant thing, and it always will be.  It's going to be a little while before I can start school, but you know that when the time comes I'll be here to tell you all about how awesome it is.  So stay tuned......

Polycystic Ovary Syndrome....Yuck!

First, before I get started, mom and I will be doing our first co-blog on Friday.  I've already read her post, and it's just as witty as one would expect!  So now I have to live up to that....good luck to me!  I can promise it will be interesting to see two very different perspectives on the same topic.  So be sure to tune in on Friday for that!

Ok, on to today's post.  This was mostly sparked by the fact that I made a doctor's appointment with a new doctor today.  So, here's a little back story.  I'm currently very over-weight.  I didn't always used to be over-weight.  After going through pictures I figure that I really started to gain weight my senior year of high school.  I was really active in high school.  Not only was I in the marching band and constantly moving (it takes more athleticism than one would think....clearly it's no football work out, but we were never sitting around doing nothing!), but I also had a gym membership throughout most of high school.  A gym membership that I actually used on average of 5 days a week.  I may not have been eating perfectly, but I don't think that I was eating poorly enough to completely cancel out my workouts or to really explain how much I ballooned.  At the end of my junior year I think I was wearing a size 12 or 13 in juniors pants.  By the time I started college I was a size 16 in women's pants.  It was only downhill from there.  I continued to gain weight through college and into recent years.  I'm now a size 20/22.  Let me tell you...it's really difficult and very expensive to shop for clothing now.  I shop at 3 stores...Old Navy, Lane Bryant and Dress Barn.  Plus I feel like crap....physically and emotionally.

Turns out, there was actually a reason for the weight gain.  Granted, in college I helped myself gain some of that weight, and I accept full responsibility for making a bad situation worse, but there's not much I can do about it now.  Anyway...in the summer of 2008 I was getting ready to move to Washington, DC and decided it would be best to get all of my doctor's appointments out of the way before I went.  I got my new contacts and glasses, and got my teeth cleaned, and made my first visit to a lady doctor.  I'd never been previously as I'd really had no need to go, or so I thought.  After going through a long list of complaints (facial hair growth, extreme cramping, weight gain etc...) the doctor decided I had Polycystic Ovary Syndrome.  I encourage you to visit the site to learn more, but it basically comes with a whole slew of really obnoxious symptoms.  I have almost all of them.  It's painful....it's frustrating....and it's hard to find a doctor that knows how to treat it.

That first doctor wrote me a couple of prescriptions for things she thought would help, and then told me to lose weight.  Then in DC the first doctor I went to told me I was likely misdiagnosed, but she didn't feel the need to go back through the symptoms with me or try to help, so I dumped her.  I finally found a doctor that I liked.  Unfortunately, she didn't specialize in PCOS (99% of the very few that did specialize in it back there are fertility specialists...not something I was looking for then, or now for that matter), but she was a wonderful person.  She did research, and tried to help me find a diet that might help spark the weight loss, all the while being sympathetic to the fact that I had a disorder that causes me to gain weight and simultaneously makes it ridiculously hard to lose it.  She was fabulous, and I lost 20 lbs while seeing her.

Now I'm back in Arizona, and was facing having to find yet another doctor.  Preferably someone who knows something about PCOS, and would be willing to do a full work up on me to figure out how severe it is, and actually treat it.  Let me tell you, it was not something I was looking forward to doing...at all.  Lucky for me, my mom spends her days talking to doctor's offices on the phone.  She's found a doctor that she assures me is amazing, and gave me a secret phone number to get a hold of the woman she knows at the office so I'd be sure to get in (how awesome is she?!).  I have an appointment with said doctor next week, so fingers crossed we can start to really figure this nastiness out and try and get rid of it.

I know this has been a long, less than uplifting, post, but it's something I struggle with daily and will likely blog about numerous times in the future.  I'm really determined to get better.  I'm currently uncomfortable in my own skin.  Literally.  I'm never fully comfortable.  I'm also in pain pretty frequently.  I know some of you may be thinking, "So you gained some weight, deal with it.  At least it's not cancer or some other awful terminal illness."  Believe me, I fully agree with you.  I have family members and friends who have battled cancer.  I have a friend with Crohn's disease.  I know that compared to what they've gone through, what I have is really minor, but that doesn't mean it doesn't suck.  So yeah, that's the reader's digest version of my battle with PCOS.

That's all for now.....come back on Friday for a much lighter post about cooking!  My first co-blog with mom.

I'm Back....Again...

I know, I know.....It's been nearly a year since my last post, so why bother? I just can't seem to let the blog go. I'm back for real this time though, because this time I have someone to hold me accountable. More about that in a bit though....

My last post had last year's New Years Resolutions in it. So let's recap on how that went shall we?

1. Love Myself - We'll just call this one a fail and leave it alone.
2. Enjoy Life More - Success overall. Once I realized I had to leave my life in DC behind I made sure to live it up good before I left.
3. Win My Battle With My Weight - This is going to be a long process obviously. It had some ups and downs this year. I lost 20 pounds...then after moving I've gained about 10-15 of those back. So starting tomorrow, it'll be time to go back to the gym and get myself back on the diet that was working.

Okay, now that we've covered that....on to the reader's digest recap of 2011:

• I continued to work at the same hotel despite many efforts to find a job elsewhere.
• I had to make the difficult decision to move back to Phoenix after 3 wonderful years in DC. Unfortunately my inability to find a new job made it financially impossible for me to stay in DC.
• My mom came to visit me for a week in DC and we had a great time being nerdy tourists for a week.
• I spent my last months in DC trying to take in as much as I could before I left. This includes many hockey and baseball games, concerts and seeing all of the tourists spots I hadn't seen yet. I didn't quite get around to everything, but it's not like I won't be visiting soon.
• In August I was a bridesmaid in a good friend's wedding. It was the weekend before I left town, and it was such a wonderful way to end my time in DC.
• My sister flew out to DC and we once again made a cross country road trip in Malibu Barbie.
• We stopped in Oklahoma City for a few days where the rest of the family met us and we got to spend some time sight seeing and spending time with a section of the family we don't normally see.
• I once again became an AZ citizen in September.
• I'm a Phoenix Coyotes season ticket holder.
• 2 of my best friends got engaged within a week of each other, and it feels like everyone I know either had a baby or announced a pregnancy in 2011.
• I'm living at home with the parents and working at the hotel I worked at last time I lived here.

That about sums up 2011. There were a lot of good points and some not so good points, and I'm ready to just move on to 2012. 2012 is going to involve a lot more blogging...no, really, it is! Mom and I are going to be participating in the Blogging from A-Z April Challenge. In order to work ourselves up to blogging 6 days a week, we're going to co-blog. Each month will have a different theme, and we're going to aim for 2 posts a month, but I'd like to think we could manage at least once a week. So stay tuned for that, and we'll see how it goes!

Welcome 2011!

Well, it's finally a new year, and past time for a new post. I know...I'm a giant slacker. What can I say...I'm a busy girl! Just like everyone else, I have some resolutions for this new year. However, I've put a lot more thought into them this year than I normally do. I wanted them to be attainable. Not something that I'm going to ditch come February. So, here they are....

1) Love Myself. Unfortunately this is something I've struggled with for a long time. Like many people, I'm my own worst critic. That added to some lovely character traits like being a perfectionist and slight over achiever don't make for the best self esteem all of the time. This will probably be the hardest of my resolutions.

2) Enjoy Life More. Don't get me wrong...I absolutely love my life 95% of the time. I have an amazing family and amazing friends, and I live in one of the most amazing cities in the country. This applies more to my stress levels than anything else. Thanks to some genetic tendencies towards anxiety, along with some of the lovely character traits from resolution #1, I stress myself out very easily. I used to be a lot better at getting a grip faster, but in the past 6 months or so I just feel like I've been spiraling. It makes it a lot harder for me to enjoy life, and it makes me not so fun to be around sometimes (I thank God that I have a roommate who is so good at putting up with my crazy and making me feel better). So I'm trying a few things to try and alleviate some of that. Like playing music again. Working it out in the gym. Writing it down in a journal, etc.

3) Finally Winning My Battle With My Weight. Considering my less than positive mental state the past 6 months, I've made some great strides in this. However, it's time to really kick it into gear and just take care of it. I'm uncomfortable in my own skin, and I have been for a long time. I don't want to feel that way anymore. I'm back on South Beach, and I got the Zumba DVD set for my birthday, so I've started that as well. I think as I work on resolutions 1 and 2 I'll have a much easier time with my weight. As of the end of December I've lost 16.5 lbs. In the next couple of weeks I'm hoping to finally get to that 20 lb. milestone.

So there you have it, Sarah's 2011 New Years Resolutions. I'm ready for you 2011...bring it on...

Holiday Hiatus

Not that you hadn't already noticed, but I'm going to be on hiatus for the holidays. I'm doing this for multiple reasons. Mainly because I just don't have time as I'm busy at work and trying to get things done before I travel West for Christmas. Secondly because with finances being tighter during the holidays it's harder to stick to the diet since good food is expensive. This has caused some yo-yo-ing in my weight that'd I'd just rather not talk about!

That being said....have a wonderful holiday season everyone....see ya in 2011!