Hi guys. I'm a 25 year old female and as of about two hours ago, I think I've finally nailed down my ever-growing list of health issues that seemed completely random and unrelated, but which now make total sense. I'm almost positive I either have Cushing's, or some variation of it. Of a sampling of symptoms I've culled from a couple reputable medical sites:
Rapid weight gain, particularly in stomach and chest
Rounded face
Excess sweating
Telangiectasia (dilation of capillaries, which would account also for facial redness)
thinning of skin, leading to easy bruising and dryness, especially hands (and my hands are always REALLY dry)
Purple stretch marks on stomach, legs, arms, breasts
Muscle weakness
Hair growth in typically male fashion
Depression/anxiety/mood swings
Memory problems
Facial acne
Excessive thirst
Hypertension
Hyperpigmentation (again accounting for red face)
Gastrointestinal disturbances
Impaired wound healing
Sore and aching joints, particularly hip, shoulders, and lower back (with me, it's primarily my left hip and lower back)
Snoring/sleep apnea
Got all of those. Strangely enough, what I believe to be the most common symptom in women, irregular periods, is pretty much the only problem I DON'T have. Yet. I didn't get all the other ones at once, either. The depression came first when I was 16, and everything else has followed until now, nearly 10 years later, the excessive sweating, chronic fatigue, and rapid and unexplainable weight gain has finally made me start to piece everything together. I used to have perfect blood pressure, now it usually borders on high. I always used to heal quickly but now it takes FOREVER for even mild cuts and scrapes to heal, and they usually scar. My hands are always really dry, no matter how much moisturizer I use. My lower back has been a constant pain for a few years now, sometimes getting so bad that I'd wake up crying at night, and now it hurts if I just walk around for a while. I don't really gain weight anywhere else but my stomach, chest, and face. I mean, my other body parts are at least mostly proportional, but it's definitely noticeable. Most notably, a couple years ago I was plagued for several months by a sudden, mysterious (and never actually diagnosed) set of gastro problems that, after alarming a doctor because I seemed to be internally bleeding somewhere they couldn't identify, led to a series of E.R. visits and finally an endoscopy and a colonoscopy. At 22. Yeah, that was fun. To this day even the thought of lemonade makes me ill. >_<
Anyway. So I think it's entirely possible that I have this, except now I'm doing the worst possible thing by continuing to read up on it and scaring myself witless because I keep reading about near-brain surgery and chemo and radiation treatment and hormone replacement therapy and...yeah. Not exactly light bedtime reading material. Since this is completely counterproductive and likely to just scare me into ignorance rather than actually doing something about it, I'm going to take a different approach and ask: how do I bring this up to a doctor? I don't have a regular doctor and I don't have insurance, and it seems the tests all require CT scans or MRIs or other involved and expensive tests that doctors are going to be reluctant to order because I can't pay for them (or at least not for all of them). Do I just make an appointment with Dr. John Smith and walk in, and when he asks what my problem is, I tell him I want tested for Cushing's and/or any other related adrenal disorders? I won't get into my issues of having other doctors blow me off with "it's genetic! it's 'cause you're getting older (at 25...?)! take an allergy pill! I don't want to come off as a know-it-all hypochondriac, but I'm tired of being blown off and having my quality of life go quickly and steadily downhill, either. What do I do now?