As Nicole recommended in her email, I quickly got to work by creating an account with Promethease in order to obtain my own health data report. One thing a lot of people don’t realize is difficult for adopted/donor conceived folks (at least when the birth parents are anonymous) is that we’re kind of going in blind when it comes to our own health. We have no idea what kinds of conditions run in “our family”, and thus don’t really have as many ways to prepare for them. It also makes visits to the doctor interesting (my family history, doctor? well, wouldn’t we both like to know!), and diagnosing certain illnesses and conditions even more challenging.
Once again, I knew that by submitting my information and viewing my results, I could be in for more bad news.
Fortunately, on the whole, my results were generally pretty benign–although not without their own interesting twists.
After receiving my results, I gave Nicole a call–the whole process is a bit overwhelming, as was the formatting of the data. Nicole walked through it with me as best she could, and together we walked through each of our results, comparing what was the same and different from what we had inherited. We also discovered (although not through our results, but just over the course of the conversation), that hypermobility (a sub-type of Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome) affects both of our families. In fact, as far as I knew up until then, I was the ONLY member of my family who had been impacted–but now I knew why, and that I wasn’t alone.
It was so interesting to swap inherited family trait notes with someone who was both a stranger and family, all at once. Only the “stranger” component was quickly fading away as we learned more about each other (and ourselves) as people.
Omg, I have to know how this turns out
Me, too! I’m trying to catch up on all of my writing in order to give myself permission to continue the search–I’ve put myself on search-purgatory until I’m ready to start searching again and posting in “real time”. Onward through the maze!