February 2013 - when it all started

February 2013. 
I go to the doctor for some reason or other, but I mention that my once hairy manly legs are now bald, is this anything to worry about? She thought not, but ordered a blood test anyway.

I hate blood tests, so dragged my heels for a couple of weeks, but I had the test anyway about 11:30 and thought no more of it. I was at work the next day about 10am, when my work phone rang, it was my wife. "The doctors surgery have been on the phone about your blood test" she said, there was me thinking blood tests took a week to come through. "They want to see you today". 

Well that was my day ruined, by the end of the day, I had imagined all kinds of horrors that had been found in my blood for them to be so desperate to see me. So off I went to see the doctor at around 5.30pm. "You've got very low adreno-cortisol levels" he told me.....well that meant a lot. What it actually meant was that it could send my blood pressure very low and cause me to pass out, and it meant that my adrenaline glands weren't producing the correct level of hormone by themselves, so I needed to take hydrocortisone steroid tablets to supplement what my body wasn't doing. It was all rather sudden, and I didn't really take in what it all meant.

The doctor said he would need to do many more blood tests (great!) to ascertain what the problem was, and refer me to an Endocrinologist.....whatever one of those was. Endo what, didn't know there was an Endocrine system. I know a lot more now, and between that fateful day in February and the following weeks, a pendulum swing of "it could be this" and "it could be that" ensued. One thing was for sure, I didn't like the sound of any of it