not really new to any of this but this specific thing keeps bugging me. my endo runs my thyroid panel and my gyno runs estradiol/progesterone and neither of them times the draw against where i actually am in perimenopause. like my TSH gets drawn whenever i happen to book the appt, could be any point in a cycle that’s already irregular as hell. meanwhile my hormone levels are obviously gonna read wildly different depending on the week.
so i’m sitting here with two sets of labs that both look “fine in isolation” but nobody’s cross referencing them against each other, let alone against the actual day. cortisol is the same story. i had one draw come back high-ish and my doc’s first move was stress, not “hey what point in your cycle was this.” but cortisol and estrogen interact, i know that much just from reading around, so a random single draw feels like it’s telling me almost nothing. is there an actual protocol for this or is it just up to the patient to insist on it?
like do you ask for draws at a specific cycle day, or fasting + same time of day every time regardless of cycle, or is that overkill and i’m overthinking a coincidence between two separate systems that don’t actually need to be read together. genuinely asking bc i don’t know if this is a real gap in how they test us or if i’m just pattern matching on nothing. anyone had a doc actually coordinate the timing between an endo panel and a hormone panel on purpose?