The last three years have been a rollercoaster in regards to my health. For the most part, I have always been a pretty healthy gal. I'd go to my annual doctor's appointments and everything has always been...well fine. The only time I can recall having had something weird was finding out that I had a benign tumor on my back, but we took care of that. So yeah, for the most part healthy. Looking back now, had I known more about my body, how it operates, and my family history, I probably would have been able to tackle my current health issue a long time ago.

At the age of 13, I had finally blossomed into a young lady. Welcome to womanhood! I remember being excited, it was a rite of passage and something to be proud of. Mind you, the only thing I knew about periods was what I was taught in school. It never was something my mom and I would talk about. All I knew was it came every month, it could last 2-7 days, and all of the important items girls need when they get it. For the first two years, I had a regular cycle! It's probably the only time I did without the help of birth control. It wasn't until my sophomore year that things started to change. My flows would get heavy, they would last 3-4 days or 7 days, or every now and then about a month. I would get it sometimes, and at times I'd go without for a few months. To tell you (TMI), I would get the worst blood clots, I kid you not, the size of baseballs coming out of my lady parts, and there were always the cramps. The more I talked to my girlfriends, (and unfortunately for many of them) they all said it was normal. Cramps were normal and some women had regular cycles and others just didn't. Nothing to be concerned about. TOTALLY WRONG. These were all early signs that something was wrong. (We can get into this later, let me know in the comments if you want to know more)

About 5 years ago I found out that my mom and brother were taking medication for Hypothyroidism. When I asked my mom about what that was, she said it was her thyroid and that the doctor had her on medication that she needed to take for the rest of her life. She said my grandmother had it and then a year later so did Jose (my brother). That kind of threw me off, so I began to ask my doctor if she could test me for hypothyroidism. For three years they would test my TSH levels to see if I was in the "normal range" and according to the results I was! When Tyler and I decided to try for kids, after two years of trying we decided we needed some help. We ended up going to a fertility center where we found out a bunch of negative news. One of them being my TPO levels were very high. Mind you, I had no idea what any of these things meant. I was just trusting what my doctors were saying. The fertility center didn't say what TPO's were, all they said was that I needed to get them down because if I attempted to get pregnant, those antibodies would attack and kill the fetus. They put me on levothyroxine and said we had to urgently go after getting pregnant. I'll just say my experience there was not that great, and I did not have peace about the news they were giving me and the direction I had to go to get pregnant. I began to do some research on what hypothyroidism was and asked for help with a more holistic approach.

Hypothyroidism or also known as Hashimoto is an autoimmune system that can cause an underactive thyroid. Symptoms of Hashimoto are:

• Constipation

• Difficulty concentrating or thinking

• Dry skin

• Enlarged neck or presence of goiter, which may be the only early symptom

• Fatigue

• Hair loss

• Heavy or irregular periods

• Intolerance to cold

• Mild weight gain

• Small or shrunken thyroid gland (late in the disease)

These were all things that I was experiencing for a very long time and blamed on either stress or lack of sleep. So many things began to make sense, starting off with why my cycles were so irregular. Hashimoto can be a hereditary issue, which makes sense being that 3 people in my family had it. The annoying thing about all of this is I was trying to be proactive. Doing blood work to make sure I was ok. And according to medicine, they would say I don't have Hashimoto's because technically my TSH levels are normal, but my body was heading in that direction. To tell you, when I went and saw the graph for myself to see how my results were doing, yes they were in the normal range, but every year, the graph line was increasing. I knew I had to do something about it, and trusting Western medicine was not the way I wanted to go.