The Chinese people believe that there is animism, the stove has the god of vesta, the earth has the land, and the aunt has the aunt god.
Chinese women are accustomed to referring to menstruation as "great aunts". The aunt god made by the Chinese Internet has a vicious face and a sense of shoddy, but she has been admired by everyone for a long time.
"One prayer for flesh, two prayers for no painful menstruation, three prayers for aunts and months..." Every month, there are worried people "worshiping aunt gods" on the Internet, praying that the menstrual holiday will come on time.
Know the worship of the aunt God group
Mao Mao was one of the worshippers of the Aunt God Sect.
Many modern people may feel this way: One of the costs of too much brain activity is a lack of attention to the body.
After work, Mao Mao often had symptoms of irregular menstruation, and the amount of menstrual blood was obviously rare compared with the past, but she did not pay too much attention.
By chance, she decided to go to the hospital to check her menstruation. Unexpectedly, since then, she has begun a long battle to defend her ovaries.
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The top three hospitals are always full of people. Sitting in the cold blue plastic seat, waiting for his name to appear on the screen, Mao Mao had a cold feeling like a falling soul.
Her opportunity to go to the hospital stemmed from a post on the Internet, in the Douban group, someone posted asking: "Is the ovarian reserve function not good, and even premature aging more and more?" ”
Douban group related posts
One of the replies made people nervous: "I went to check the Amh value, and the doctor said that I was 24 years old, 40 years old ovaries."
The comment with the largest number of likes said: "25 years old, peony (mother-fetus single), the last few times the amount is very small, basically the third day is nothing, is it time to check it", followed by a crying expression.
Unlike the afflicting pain of fever and headache, in daily life, as long as the mentality is good enough, the so-called menstrual irregularities will not bring actual trouble or pain to women. If the amount is small or directly stopped, it even gives people the feeling of "nothing loose".
"The Cultivation of Ordinary Women 2"
But it's also just an illusion of ease.
The time of calling the number was earlier than Mao Mao thought, about ten minutes of waiting, and at 11 a.m. on weekdays, Mao Mao was called to the door of the gynecologist's office to wait for consultation. At the door, there were several young or middle-aged women holding case books and test reports, and when she saw them, she suddenly had this idea: Because menstruation is not adjusted to the hospital, is it a bit of a fuss and a waste of medical resources?
Menstruation is the shedding and bleeding of the uterine lining that occurs in accordance with the changes in the ovarian cycle, which is a sign of reproductive maturation. The importance of menstruation to women is self-evident, but how to care about menstrual health is not a measure that everyone can clearly grasp.
Finally it was Mao Mao's turn, and after expressing the scarcity of menstruation, the doctor began to ask her about her menstrual cycle, whether her menstrual period had recently been postponed or postponed. Before coming to the hospital, Mao Mao learned a lot of knowledge about menstruation and ovaries from the Internet, and he also fell into the panic of premature ovarian failure and infertility like all the people who "saw a doctor on Baidu".
She went through a lot of information without understanding her body, and she was sad to find that she couldn't answer these questions.
Stills from The Witch's Court
This is followed by a routine six-test of sex hormones — a test of multiple endocrine hormones that can be used to identify many conditions.
When Mao Mao appeared in the hospital for the third time holding the test report, the results came out.
"Hormones are not normal", the doctor "brushed" in front of the pituitary prolactin, testosterone, luteinizing hormone and drew a rising symbol, indicating that the concentration of these hormones is too high.
In particular, prolactin, the reference standard is between 108.8-557.1mIU/L, and the result of gross hair reaches 630.99mIU/L. In general, too high prolactin can affect ovarian function and inhibit ovulation.
The doctor said: "It is a manifestation of suspected ovarian polycystics. ”
If simple hormonal abnormalities cannot make people intuitively experience the crisis, the doctor's gentle and strange words then made Mao Mao suffer a great blow: "If you want to prepare for pregnancy, first come to the hospital to regulate hormones." ”
Suddenly, a wave-like thought rolled through MaoMao's mind: she was not normal, she was having difficulty getting pregnant.
Stills from "Thunderbolt on a Sunny Day"
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Similar to Mao Mao, Hu Ying, who was born in 1997, also cried when she was diagnosed with ovarian polycystic syndrome last year.
Ode to Joy
Irregular menstruation is a matter of habit for Hu Ying. "My periods have never been normal," she says. Hu Ying's irregular menstruation began in junior high school, which was manifested as a certain month of extreme menstruation, accompanied by dysmenorrhea; and a few months of very little menstruation, and lasted for two weeks.
When her female elders were young, most of them also had abnormal menstrual leave and did not pay attention to her abnormal situation. In addition, when Hu Ying was in middle school, she sought chinese medicine with her classmates with irregular menstruation, and Chinese medicine maintained the stability of her menstrual cycle, but due to frequent drinking and vomiting and heavy academics, she gradually forgot about the abnormalities of her body.
Until after work, she did not come to menstruation for two or three months, and under the persuasion of female colleagues around her, she came to a private hospital in Beijing to see a doctor.
Hu Ying first did the ovarian color ultrasound, "He (the doctor) will teach you to count, count how many bubbles you have (in the ovaries). ”
Although there are still cases where ovarian polycysts are determined only by six sex hormones, according to Wu Wei, attending physician of the Obstetrics and Gynecology Hospital Affiliated to Zhejiang University School of Medicine, the clinical diagnosis of ovarian polycysts generally needs to meet multiple conditions, one is the symptoms of menstrual disorders, such as prolonged cycles and irregular vaginal bleeding; the second is that the color ultrasound shows that the ovaries have multiple cystic changes; and the third is the clinical manifestations of high androgens, such as hirsutism and acne.
The pathology of ovarian polycystic syndrome is caused by unknown reasons caused by the "hypothalamic-pituitary-ovarian axis" to mediate dysfunction, simply understood, the result of the mediation disorder is that the ovaries produce excess androgens, androgens inhibit the growth of follicles, resulting in difficulty in the formation of mature eggs, which is further manifested as ovarian polycystic changes.
Ovarian polycystic syndrome
Polycystic changes are the most intuitive organ changes in ovarian polycystics. If the color ultrasound shows that there are small strings of bubbles inside the ovaries, those are immature follicles.
The first time I saw a doctor, I brought a lot of psychological pressure to Hu Ying, "it was very uncomfortable", she said. The doctor who received the consultation explained to her the consequences of ovarian polycystics from three aspects, one is to increase the probability of other gynecological diseases, the other is to cause hairy body surface, strong oil secretion, acne, and the third is to reduce the probability of conception.
Hu Ying said that the seriousness of the doctors at that time "frightened" her, and in order to get a better diagnosis, she then went to many hospitals and found that different doctors had different attitudes about "how serious are the ovarian polycysts".
The second doctor spoke in a slightly slower tone, insisting that Hu Ying needed drugs to regulate hormones; while the third doctor, "not so aggressive about medical means", said to her that she could take drugs for a period of time first, and if the hormones were controlled within a reasonable range, they could "not deliberately think about it" and would not have an impact on daily life.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="122" > modern disease</h1>
According to CCTV financial reports, the infertility rate of couples of childbearing age in China climbed to about 12%-18%, and the demand for assisted reproductive technology soared. On the one hand, this is due to the continuous decline in male sperm quality, with foreign media reports, the Hebrew University and New York Medical School studies found that in the past 40 years, the sperm count of men in Western countries has dropped by 59.3%.
The decline in male fertility has become a hot issue in today's society. It is generally believed that the decline in sperm quality is related to environmental factors, such as the stress of modern life, obesity, smoking habits and chemicals in daily contact items.
Relatively speaking, women's ovarian health receives less attention. Mao Mao and Hu Ying are not alone, they are also affected by modern lifestyles, and the ovarian health problems of young women are becoming more and more serious.
In 2013, a doctoral dissertation from a student at Guangzhou University of Traditional Chinese Medicine showed that the incidence of ovarian polycystics was as high as 5%-10%,, while Liu Zhaoyang, director of the Gynecology Department of Beijing Dongcheng Hospital of Traditional Chinese Medicine, publicly stated in 2017 that the incidence of polycystic ovary syndrome in women showed an upward trend, reaching 10%, that is, every ten women between the ages of 20 and 40 in childbearing periods may have ovarian polycystics.
Hu Ying has an intuitive feeling about her menstrual problems: "Staying up too late, the pressure is too big to directly reflect on my irregular menstruation. ”
Stills from "My First Love Was a Crush"
At present, there is no theory that can fully explain the cause of polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), but there have been many studies that have shown that the occurrence of the disease is associated with some factors.
One of the major factors is the mental and psychological condition. Hu Ying said that she has been depressed for many years and "does not have a very pleasant and comfortable feeling." In 2005, Wang Yurong's study found that the number of schizophrenia and mental illness in the family of PCOS patients was much higher than that of the normal control group.
On the other hand, similar to the reasons for the decline in sperm quality in men, environmental factors also play a certain role. Studies have shown that environmental endocrine disruptors such as drinking water in disposable plastic cups, the history of living or working decoration, and kitchen fumes are all high risk factors for the development of ovarian polycystic diseases; environmental pollution also affects women's physical health, and Pm2.5 will also lead to a decline in ovarian reserve function.
Stills from "The Cultivation of Ordinary Women 2"
After entering the workplace, Hu Ying found that colleagues around her often had irregular menstruation. Concerns about ovarian health have also allowed her to discover more "kinds of people". "More and more people with more sacs, not a big deal", a year after the diagnosis, she slowly let go of the psychological pressure, and now she prefers to understand ovarian polycystics as a common phenomenon of modern female hormone secretion disorders.
After returning from the hospital, Mao Mao followed the doctor's instructions and began to take drugs every day to regulate hormones. She replaced her mobile phone wallpaper with "Don't stay up late", before, she was more accustomed to thinking and sorting out her thoughts in the silent nights.
Mao Mao made up his mind to work regularly, exercise regularly, and more importantly, make himself happy – although for modern people, this is not an easy task.
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