Weight gain, anxiety, acne painful periods: ‘The day I learned what polycystic ovary syndrome was’
Weight gain, acne, anxiety, pain, missed periods are just the start. Infertility looms large. One in eight women has polycystic ovary syndrome. Many don’t know it. Bimini Plesser was one of them. Until she wasn’t. This is her story.
My weight has fluctuated since I was a teenager. So has my mental health. When I look back at my younger years, I wonder at how I thought my experience was normal.
Being 15 is hard for anyone, especially if you’ve got no idea why you’re experiencing puberty differently from your friends.
I was a relatively late bloomer. When my friends started sharing the fun facts written on sanitary item packaging and talking about their apparent womanhood, I felt like I was falling behind.
When I finally got my first period at the age of 15, I thought I was starting to catch up. That relief, however, was short-lived.
My period was irregular from the get-go. One cycle would be a normal 30 days, but then it would disappear for months at a time.
I guess growing up under the impression that no two women’s cycles are the same, and being given virtually no education on my body, led me to believe it was all part of the trials of womanhood.
Maybe becoming a woman meant having weird and uncomfortable things happen. Maybe I just needed to get outside a little more, run a little harder, and learn to relax.
As children grow up, they talk about how tall they are, how much they weigh – it’s normal – but I hated it because my number always seemed too high.
Despite training four nights a week as a competitive dancer and looking healthy, seeing the number on the scale go up and hearing my doctor tell me I weighed “a bit above average” never made me feel healthy.
My friends used to tell me I was lucky compared to them. I thought I had it easy when my period didn’t arrive. I knew I couldn’t be pregnant (the only “condition” I’d been told to look out for at school), so I wrote it off as normal because “everyone’s cycle is different” … right? Wrong.
I started taking an oral contraceptive when I was 18. One perk of going on the pill was being given a regular cycle for the first time in my life. The downside was I had no way to gauge the state of my reproductive health for the two years I was taking it. I just assumed everything was A-OK.
When I came off birth control in February 2023, things took a turn. I got my period about a month after I stopped taking the pill, and then again about six weeks later. Then it stopped.
For the next 10 months, my cycle was non-existent.
The first period I missed didn’t worry me too much; I’d seen this before.
Even the second one didn’t scare me.
By the time the third month passed, I was on university exchange in London and far, far away from my bulk-billing GP.
Being 21, low on savings, and blissfully unaware of just how troubling a symptom I was exhibiting, I decided I’d let it play out while I was in the UK and go to the doctor when I returned home.
By Christmas 2023 I was back in Australia and my period was still nowhere to be seen, so I went to see my doctor, who ordered a blood test and an ultrasound.
When I sat down in her office on January 23, 2024, she cut to the chase.
She told me I had polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) and handed me a stack of papers that explained what the condition was, the long list of possible symptoms, the array of health professionals I should contact, and the medication I’d be prescribed.
Compared to those of most PCOS patients, my diagnosis was fast and smooth.
Unfortunately, that only happened because things were evidently very wrong when I walked into my first appointment.
The day I was diagnosed was also the day I learned what PCOS was.
My doctor told me this chronic condition affects roughly one in eight women and girls and, due to hormonal imbalances, causes a host of nasty symptoms. The scariest sounding one was infertility risk.
DID I WANT TO HAVE A BABY AT 21?
Hearing that women with PCOS can struggle to fall pregnant naturally, and are at greater risk of complications if they do, was distressing, to say the least.
Did I want to have a baby at 21? No. Did I hope to have one eventually? Absolutely.
It felt like I had to consider my long-term life and family plan right then and there – freeze my eggs or something, I really didn’t know.
I was mid-spiral when my doctor interrupted my thoughts, telling me that women with PCOS are often able to have as many children as they want, as long as they prioritise a healthy lifestyle.
Slightly relieved, I turned to the wad of papers in my hands that detailed the painful, trying, and similarly life-changing impacts of this chronic condition we were yet to cover.
ACNE, WEIGHT GAIN, DEPRESSION AND DOLLARS
Having PCOS puts you at risk of severe acne, excess facial and body hair, thinning hair on your scalp, weight gain, type 2 diabetes, depression, body dysmorphia, and anxiety, not to mention potentially financially crippling medical expenses.
In a lucky coincidence, I got a diagnosis during my final year at university and my student Health Care Card from Centrelink covered all of my fees.
Without that concession, I would have been hundreds of dollars out of pocket. While blood tests are bulk-billed, the two GP appointments and pelvic ultrasound I needed came to a total of $244, or $435 before Medicare rebates.
I can only imagine how much my diagnosis would have cost if I’d had to seek out specialists after multiple fruitless trips to the GP like so many other women.
Lucky to have avoided the burden of a long diagnostic process, I started reading the list of symptoms and linked conditions.
As I read, things started clicking into place.
The debilitating anxiety I have been battling for years made a little more sense.
While I can’t directly attribute my anxiety to PCOS, I can confidently say my psychological disorder and physical condition have worked closely together to ensure I get the most out of them both.
PCOS SPIRAL
Gaining a bit of weight? Having an acne breakout? Time to spend hours worrying about it.
Feeling unwell or in pain because it’s that time of the month? Better start overthinking how my friends or bosses will take it when I tell them I can’t leave the house.
My anxiety and PCOS are undeniably intertwined and, when they’re both in full force, it can be truly debilitating.
With my diagnosis, I also got an explanation for my bizarre reproductive cycle.
My years of light, infrequent, and sometimes painful periods finally made a bit of sense. It didn’t make my history any less concerning, but it gave me some clarity on what had been happening.
I left my doctor’s office that day with a lot of conflicting thoughts, and a prescription for Metformin, a drug that helps to lower blood glucose levels.
Most PCOS patients have insulin resistance, which means your body doesn’t process sugar the way it should. Instead of taking sugar from your blood and putting it into your body’s cells to make energy, hormonal imbalances allow glucose to build up in your bloodstream, something that can have fairly dire consequences.
Often the cause of weight gain in PCOS patients, high blood glucose ultimately can lead to prediabetes or type 2 diabetes if left unchecked. While I’m not prediabetic, I started taking Metformin as a preventive measure. The first month or two were grim. Because it lowered my blood glucose to levels my body wasn’t used to, I felt exhausted for the first six weeks I was taking Metformin.
It also disrupts the digestive system, so I spent a lot of the first month or two feeling incredibly nauseous. You have to take the medication with dinner and, to this day, if I don’t eat enough or I forget to take my pills right after my meal, I wake up the next morning feeling sick.
It’s all worth it though, because it helped my cycle come back.
Regular exercise and relatively healthy eating have also played a big role in my reproductive reboot, but I think the medication definitely helped.
CRIPPLING PAIN
A big downside to this otherwise excellent sign for my health is the pain.
The day before my cycle starts and the day or two after are awful. In recent months, I’ve had to spend at least one day confined to my apartment or sometimes my bed because of the cramps.
This crippling pain makes it hard to enjoy such a promising sign for my health and fertility. What’s frustrating to me is that by all accounts, I’ve been lucky.
Unlike others with this condition, I didn’t have to deal with facial hair and cystic acne in high school. I wasn’t 90kg at the age of 16. I didn’t have to go to four doctors or fork out hundreds of dollars to see a specialist before I was sent off for blood tests and ultrasounds, and I certainly didn’t have to wait until I was in my 30s and struggling to fall pregnant to get a diagnosis.
I didn’t have to face any of that, and still my experience with PCOS has been challenging, confusing and isolating.
I can’t fathom how little young women are taught about their own bodies.
I’ve always thought it weird, but now that I’ve discovered just how seriously that lack of education can affect your life, I’m appalled.
Realistically, between one and three girls in any given classroom in Australia have PCOS and yet, to the best of my knowledge, almost none of them have heard of the condition. I certainly never learned about it.
We need to do better because young women deserve to have the tools to recognise symptoms of this common and incredibly trying condition.
We need to do better because my story shouldn’t be considered lucky.
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