I am a 49 year old woman who has had 4 ectopic pregnancies. I have never carried a child longer than about 6 weeks. I have also had a hysterectomy and am down to one ovary. I think I have started menopause 3 or 4 times already judging by the hot flashes. Now that you know my brief medical history here is the weirdness – I have breast milk.
It is not much. I occasionally leak little drops but the fullness, heaviness and soreness is there. I have had the discharge tested and nothing out of the ordinary was there – except breast milk. I have had hormone tests and everything comes back ‘normal’. There is no ‘scientific’ reason why this is occuring.
Once the doctors thought it was a side effect of the medicine I am taking for PCS, The problem with that theory is it started occuring at least 15 years before I started the medication.
Occasionally it is bothersome but I think at this point I am just used to it. I get swollen glands sometimes and it REALLY hurts but other than that I ignore it. I dont even bring it up to the doctors anymore as they automatically blame it on the medication. Am I the only one in the world with this?
Certainly, there are a myriad of medications that can cause what is called galactorrhea, so we wouldn’t advise dismissing this possibility. A medication induced side effect can be quickly ascertained by looking up the medications that you are on and their respective side effects. To search effective type in the medication and the side effects you are experiencing rather than simply searching the medication and reviewing the list of side effects.
Your constellation of symptoms is unusual. Here are some resources to begin investigating the latest research. A cursory glance, suggests there is not much on ectopic pregnancy and galactorrhea (non pregnant milk secretion), but if you dig maybe it will lead to something. Much of research is simply a tedious digging through lots and lots of resources until one has the answer one is looking for.
Here are some suggestions about where to look:
Highwire is a free medical search engine out of Stanford. Go to the main site. http://highwire.stanford.edu/
Click the ‘more search options’.
When you get to the advanced page enter your search terms. You might have to try a number of different combinations of search terms.
Another option Quertle: http://www.quertle.info/
This search engine, also free works via semantic function- power search terms/phrases what is or relationship between. We did a preliminary search and couldn’t find anything, but you may have other symptoms/search terms that you may add to the equation and that may net better results.
You might also try Pubmed Central – also free, it is repository of NIH funded research.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/
Try different combinations of search terms. We’ll keep reaching out to the various Lucine communities to see what we can find.
Keep us posted on what you discover. There are likely other women, just like. We simply need to find them.
As an OB/GYN, I have dealt with similar issues. You may want to ask your physician draw a prolactin level and a complete thyroid profile. You may also want to check out my website http://www.hendersonNVobgyn.com to read about salivary hormone testing. Hope this helps.