Holy health scares, Batman!

The past week has been bonkers. As you saw in my previous post, Saturday I ended up in the ER with a potential stroke that turned out to only be a temporary nerve injury. And on Tuesday afternoon, health scare number two began.

I got a call from my primary care doctor saying one of my labs came back positive for "smooth muscle antibodies" which is indicative of autoimmune hepatitis.

Wait....what?!?!

This was shocking since my liver ultrasound results came back normal the previous Friday. She said I needed to go to a liver specialist.

I consulted doctor Google, and in a nutshell he said autoimmune hepatitis is a condition in which your immune system decides to attack and destroy your liver. Unfortunately it's not something affected by diet or exercise, its basically something you're born with. The only treatment is years of steroids to try to get it into remission. And if the liver damage becomes so severe, you may need a liver transplant. It's very serious.

I have spent every moment since that call worrying like a crazy woman.

I emailed my RE and told her what was going on because I am due for CD1 any moment now and I was supposed to start birth control pills. And to my disappointment, she replied telling me to hold off on starting pills until we know what's up with my liver. I was running on about one hour of sleep, so needless to say I was a sobbing mess yesterday. It was just way too overwhelming.

Luckily, I was able to get an appointment for this morning to see my gastroenterologist's physician's assistant. She went over all of my labs and ultrasound and confidently determined I do not have autoimmune hepatitis. She said my liver enzymes would be much higher than they actually are. That in conjunction with my other lab results, she said to not worry about hepatitis. She said that the antibody test is very finicky and can be impacted by many factors and this looked like a fluke. Mine tested as an extremely weak positive (1:20) and that anything below 1:20 is considered a negative anyway.

WHAT A RELIEF.

I still have an appointment on Tuesday with an actual GI doctor. Call me crazy but I want an actual MD to tell me not to worry and not just a PA, but I'm still extremely relieved.

I emailed my RE letting her know what the PA said and she just replied letting me know she feels comfortable once again with me starting birth control pills as planned! All in all, it was a minor (yet very upsetting) hiccup that appears to be nothing.

And in embryo news, I sent the contract off to Libby yesterday. And according to UPS it will arrive on Tuesday. If she and her husband are able to sign fairly quickly, we might even have the contract back by the end of next week. Can you believe it?