by Christine
(Provo, UT, USA)
Hi, I am 34 years old, female, I have three young children ages 1-5, and I've battled depression almost my whole life. I thought my depression was gone when I was in my 20's. I had Hyperemesis Gravidarum for all three pregnancies and, instead of losing weight initially, I gained a large amount of weight during each pregnancy. I was malnourished, and my depression returned in the form of severe postpartum depression that turned into full depression and has never gone away. I've had a pretty stressful life for the last 6 years because of hormone imbalance. I've had other symptoms like insomnia, dry hair, eczema, fuzzy mind and terrible memory when my memory used to be one of my strengths as a person. I've had cracked heels as long as I can remember, chronic dry lips most recently, fatigue, and, also recently, heavy bleeding during periods and very painful periods, which I have never experienced until this year. My symptoms have progressively gotten worse even though I've made a lot of lifestyle changes to improve my depression and symptoms. Now only have depression around my ovulation and bleeding time of the month, my other symptoms are almost constant. My depression times are still so severe with thoughts of suicide and physical harm. I am so done with being marginally functional every month and expecting to be bipolar every month. It's so hard on my husband and my family and me. I'm so thankful I found this site. I've been using progesterone for two weeks now and have upped my dosage a few times so that now I'm up to 600mg/day but still have severe depression days. My question is do I keep increasing the progesterone every few days until I am no longer having severe depression or do I wait two weeks or so to see if things level out? My depression is so bad that I don't want to wait longer than I have to in order to find my progesterone dominant level. So how frequently should I increase my dose and when do I wait to see if that dosage will work? I've already had a few symptoms resolve like less hair loss and no more chronic dry and burning lips. I'm also sleeping a lot better these days. I've had a few days that were spectacular and so awesome that motivate me to keep going. Your input and experiences would be so welcome about this. Thank you for your feedback and help.