Cortisol & S.I.G.M.

Someone medical wanted me to get my cortisol levels checked earlier this year, but I didn't need to bother. I knew what they would say. They would have been through the roof. I've no doubt. I think they're coming down now and I think my health is improving a little bit as a result.

But that's only because I finally got some medical answers as to what was making me so sick. I largely had to find these answers myself, with my own intuitive testing through 21st century "online physican-mediated" medicine. The tests the doctors ran just ruled things out that I had been worried about. But none of their tests ruled anything in.

Wait, they did find the hypothyroidism, but that was a no-brainer when I told them my body temp issues and such.

What I didn't know was this about cortisol...



Cortisol

Depressed individuals can have high cortisol levels. Cortisol is a stress hormone, and mood disorders often occur during stressful points in one’s life. Elevated stress hormones can affect functioning of the hippocampus, an important centre for memory and cognitive processes. Overproducing cortisol can also impair the brain’s ability to regenerate neurons in the hippocampus.

I mean everybody knows stress impacts these things, but I couldn't figure out why (with a good MRI and cat-scan) I was still having so many memory difficulties.

This might explain a lot of it.

I remember the one doctor saying, "You feet couldn't have peeled, because that would mean you would have had septicemia."

Now I'm virtually certain I did have septicemia. My temperature didn't spike much because I had rampant, uncontrolled hypothryodism to boot. I was sick and completely lost my appetite and had weird breaking out in a blanching rash and such, but no lymph gland swelling, no temperature to speak of. No night sweats. No nausea. Just little weird wobbles of fever that would vanish in an hour. I still freeze Lee when I put my hands on him sometimes, which is funny. And I always tell him he has a fever when I feel his forehead because my hands are ice. I take his temperature to irritate him, and he's perfectly normal lol.

I'm looking forward to saving on air conditioning this summer. It will counterbalance the hit on heating from having the space heater practically grafted to my body.

I do stupid things though. I step into the purely hot water of the bathtub with no cool to dilute it. I mean I only turn one handle. Because the ice of my blood rises pleasantly to meet it and I'm in Heaven. But very hot water is terrible for your skin. You have to moisturize because it will dry skin out. You probably know this.

But I think I did have meningitis earlier this year when those bacteria first attacked me and went over into septicemia.

I had the head pain.

And I was putting objects in the fridge then that didn't belong in the fridge and doing other things like Lady Macbeth in her sleep. My brain felt scrambled.

I stupidly ate these hard candies a few days ago and they splintered like glass (some stupid fucking Euro candy) and cut my tongue so it bled like a motherfucker.

Now I think it might be infected.

There's some redness there and soreness. But it gets better. Then it worsens again.

I'm immunocompromised (especially for the bacteria that have the biofilms) and I have the chronic sinusitis that almost all SIGM people have.

The weather affects me more than it does other people now. In a really shitty way.

I seem to have sailed through tons of cases of swine flu and been fine on my dozens of hospital visits. And I'm fairly sure I was around a lot of sick people with communicable things which I did not pick up. But the swine flu thing was often an age issue. If you had been exposed to something similar in the past you might have already been immune.

One thing about S.I.G.M.--doctors do know the bacteria which will impact us most.

And you NEVER want to use steroidal treatments. I was given those before this condition was diagnosed. Steroids and other medications that ratchet down the immune system are always a deal with the Devil. That's why you always hear those terrifying warnings on their commercials for those medications. I mean the medicines used to treat conditions in which the disease process is the result of an overactive immune system. You're basically opening your body up to less vigilance for things like various cancers when you ratchet down the immune system with those drugs.

SIGM people already have a predisposition to certain cancers, especially lymphatic cancer. And the really bad lymphatic one. Which one is highly curable? Non-Hodgkins, I think? Then we're predisposed to the Hodgkins.

My ears drive me nuts sometimes. I have recurrent Eustachian tube collapse which affects how I hear things and irritates me.

My Immunoglobulin M is at 33.

My G and A are high normal.

This could be secondary to cancer or secondary to an autoimmune condition.

Maybe I really am a primary case of SIGM since looking backwards I can see ridiculously aggressive bronchitises I have had. Upper respiratory tract infections are where most SIGM people take the biggest hits. It's a certain group of microbes which colonize here which are most noxious for us.

So if I can trace this back ten years (and I remember symptoms that could be this ten years back) then maybe it's not cancer announcing itself. Maybe it's just something I've been living with for years, and which I've been making excuses for.

I was sure this was something that "happened" to me this year, when I had that strep overrun my body.

My first impulse was to blame it on a very nasty strain of strep.

But now I think it really was "host factors." I was the problem, not the strep.

When I was drinking, I downplayed my illnesses and worried only briefly when my doc thought I might have COPD despite not being a smoker, etc. That bronchitis occurred two summers back, out of nowhere, and I had never had bronchitis happen in isolation before, without even getting a cold or feeling sick. I had had severe lung pain, very localized, at the onset of this, so I thought I had actually had a pulmonary embolism. I could have had. If those things don't kill you, they are often missed. In fact, if those things DO kill you, they are often missed. It's one of the most missed causes of death in autopsies according to what I've read.

And when they did the tests (spirometry, chest X-rays and such) on me, I was just grateful to hear I was okay. Either the antibiotics had done their work (I had been coughing up some blood) or else it had really been an embolism. They wouldn't have necessarily known though, if it were the latter, since time had passed before the X-rays were taken and I had started feeling better.

But now I think it really was a bacterial attack that time too.

The incidence in America of SIGM is tiny, but it's many times the incidence in Europe. This makes me wonder about environmental rather than genetic causes.

Or it could just be it's underdiagnosed in Europe. It's not often diagnosed here. Chances are it will never even occur as a potential diagnosis to your typical g.p. or most doctors who didn't have specialized training in immunology. Even if you are sick all the time or get severely sick sometimes. They will probably think you picked up a "nasty strain."

Or they might (naturally) worry about that most regrettably familiar form of immunocompromise, h.i.v.

I'm not sure if my S.I.G.M. could be caused by my hemochromatosis or not. Immunoglobulins are affected by this condition but not in a really predictable fashion from what I could glean.

I'm reading physiology textbooks now, because I need more in-depth information about how certain bodily systems work.

I need a lot more knowledge about endocrinology and hematology.

I am worried by how uninformed modern medicine seems about immunoglobulin deficiencies and pathologies.

I mean, I'm sure immunologists are up on this, but I don't think the information is filtering down.

Nobody understands how people can have SIGM, because you're not supposed to have low IgM and normal IgG and IgA levels, since M is at the base of the production scheme.

Maybe processes like cancer and autoimmune diseases just deplete it.

It would seem to be the logical conclusion.