It’s a story I see over and over again and it seems to be by design.

Women with breast implants begin having symptoms. At first, it’s just one. Maybe they don’t even realize it’s an out of the ordinary occurrence: more than usual hair loss in the shower.

Then it’s a few. Excessive hair loss, thinning eyebrows, acne and premature aging, joint pain, insomnia, fatigue.

After that, it’s checking the thyroid – Hashimoto’s? Speculation about autoimmune arthritis. Midlife issues. Standard hormone blood panels that missed estrogen dominance.

The point here is, for some reason, the implants are always the last thing to be considered. And it turns out, if you mention them to your doctor, well, that could be the only thing you ever need to say to throw yourself off the right track for years… even decades.

Now you’re locked in prison with the enemy and you don’t even know it. You’ve been gaslit.

I genuinely don’t remember my first symptom, but I know it didn’t really even occur to me that it could be the implants until, about three years in and I’d gotten the hives for what seemed like no reason. I supposed I was allergic to something in my environment – something I’d eaten or touched. I remember having very sensitive skin as a kid, everything that came into contact with my skin seemed to trigger a reaction.

After a few days, the hives went away and so did my care for what caused them. 

And then, three years later, it happened again. The hives were back. It was a very stressful time for me; we’d lost our dog outside and it was supposed to be below freezing overnight. My adrenaline was pumping for the entire day, trying to find her, and the hives just showed up. This time was different, though. This time, they spread to cover my entire body, head to toe, eyelids, inside my ears, lips and going inside my mouth, every surface of my skin was covered. 

AND – this time they stayed for 9 days. 

Over those 9 days a few important revelations occurred in my life and in my mind.

First, I went to urgent care after several days in a row of unbearable 24/7 hives. They gave me a shot of prednisone and the hives went away within just a few minutes. They gave me a prescription for prednisone and sent me on my way. I asked if they could tell me what was causing the hives and of course they could not and only recommended I follow up with my doctor. At the time, I was just glad they were gone. 

Two hours later, I hadn’t even filled my prescription yet, and the hives had returned with a vengeance. It was too late to fill the prescription, so off to google I went, where I fell into a rabbit hole of message boards that were many years old and filled with people who had been suffering for years  with the hives, and nightmares about what happens if you get on prednisone.

The next day, I made an appointment with my doctor. At that time, I still had the hives. By the time I would have my appointment, I’d discovered that while no antihistamine could touch it for 9 days, Zyrtec started to help on the 10th day. And, I showed up at my appointment finally, hive-free.

A week and a half later, after I’d gotten my phD in Google Quackery, I was convinced I must have something that had just been discovered by holistic doctors and was being called leaky gut syndrome. This was in 2008 and there were no real answers yet about this phenomenon – outside of the fact that it was not accepted as a real thing by mainstream medicine. Even the ‘microbiome’ was still pseudoscience back then.

So at my appointment, I was determined to find out what had been the cause of the hives so I could avoid ever having to deal with that again.

But of course she had no answers. She at least ordered every blood test she could think of to dig for answers, which I did appreciate.

On my way out the door, I finally said, “oh hey, by the way, on my intake paperwork, I disclosed that I have breast implants… could they be a problem for me?”

And she said, “absolutely not.”

Okey-dokie.