A friend of mine is a two-time survivor of breast cancer. She is a single woman, diagnosed at age 40, who chose a double mastectomy and reconstructive surgery. Along the way, she’s had a lot of challenging medical procedures, fears, and unpleasant side effects. After dealing with the immediate medical issues, she realized she was depressed, and turned to the internet for help.
She found numerous online resources for cancer, and breast cancer specifically. She was steeped in depression, lethargic at best, but that’s when she got angry! Her anger pleased me as a therapist, by the way, because getting angry often leads to action, and she needed to take some serious action to get out of her depression. She found that there were a lot of people saying “Why me?” about cancer. (As an aside, there are two very helpful organizations online called www.whyme.org for pediatric cancer and www.y-me.org for breast cancer.). But what she said to me is “Why NOT me?! Who am I to be so special that I escape a very common disease?” She found “why-ing” to be pointless and actually an impediment to her getting well. And here I’d been thinking that it was a perfectly reasonable question!
I’d venture a guess that you’ve said “Why me?” more than a few times when it comes to your PCOS. I know I have. There are many questions and thoughts that come along with that first thought, and all of them have the underlying subtext of “THIS IS SO UNFAIR”:
• Why do other women get to go on a diet and lose weight with relative ease?
• Why do other women get pregnant by accident, and I tried for a decade and it never happened?
• Why do I have to shave my face every day (or spend thousands of dollars on laser hair removal and electrolysis)?
• Who is ever going to love me/want to have sex with me when I look like this?
• Why do I have to take all these supplements?
• Why can’t I eat carbs like normal people?
• WHAT is happening with my hair?
• Why do I need an endocrinologist? And a cardiologist? And, and, and…
It IS unfair. It’s expensive, inconvenient, awkward, uncomfortable, scary, humiliating, enraging, and a whole lot of other things. And yet, the reality is, 10 – 20% of women have PCOS. You are fortunate enough to know that you’ve got it, so you can start dealing with it proactively. You found this blog, and hopefully some other resources. As http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_von_Humboldt Karl Wilhelm von Humboldt says, “How a person masters his fate is more important than what his fate is.”
So your fate is PCOS. I know it’s a hard thing to accept. But once you can move to acceptance you can take action. Mastery of your fate means taking control, and making choices that support your good health. It means understanding that, although genetics dealt you a bad hand, there are many things you can do to positively affect the daily quality of your life, and your long-term health, well-being, and longevity.
Instead of saying “Why Me?” (and really, it IS okay to say it every now and then – you’re not perfect, you’re human, and a little self-pity may be a necessary step along the road to further and fuller acceptance), see if you can feel a shift in your mental landscape by saying “Why not me? Yeah, why not me?” Then move forward from there with something more productive.
Gretchen Kubacky, Psy.D. is a Health Psychologist in private practice in West Los Angeles, California. She specializes in counseling women and couples who are coping with infertility, PCOS, and related endocrine disorders and chronic illnesses.
If you would like to learn more about Dr. HOUSE or her practice, or obtain referrals in the Los Angeles area, please visit her website at www.drhousemd.com, or e-mail her at Gretchen@drhousemd.com. You can also follow her on Twitter @askdrhousemd.