Fatigue in a teenage girl, help me think this through - update in #36
I am posting because I really don't know exactly what is causing my daughter's fatigue.
It all started earlier this spring. She's a club soccer player. She was complaining that during games her legs were feeling really heavy and she felt like she did not have a lot of energy to play. I tried some of the obvious things like drink more water, go to bed earlier and get more sleep, eat better before games, etc. Her energy has not improved much, and she has not been really good about doing the above things I just mentioned. The confounding factor is that high school has a really early start time for us. It starts at 7:20 a.m. in the bus comes at 6:33 am. I know she is absolutely not getting enough sleep. She's just not super tired and ready to wind down early at night and is lucky if she gets 6-6.5 hrs of sleep. Sometimes it is even less. I would become a basket case on that little amount of sleep.
So getting back to the soccer issue, she's getting really frustrated because she feels like she doesn't have the energy to play how she wants. I'd say maybe about 6-8 weeks after that she started to have crying spells for no reason and seemed to have moments where she appeared very depressed and it appeared to me that she was becoming more depressed. I took her to the pediatrician to discuss both the depression and the fatigue. Her doctor ordered a complete metabolic panel which came back negative for anemia, diabetes, and thyroid issues. The pediatrician also recommended counseling and evaluation by a psychiatrist to see if she needed to be on medication, because when she took the depression screening at the office she scored as having moderate depression. That all made sense to me and she has now started counseling.
I totally know full well that depression can cause fatigue. But other than playing soccer she seems fine as far as her energy level, it's really when she exerts herself that she feels it the most.
Over the past two weeks her mood has improved, and we have really been working hard with her on getting more sleep. Luckily there's a lot of end of year testing in high school right now, so on some days they don't need to go in until later which is really helped a lot. And she just started seeing the counselor and is just really early and the process so I know we have a lot of work to go on that.
But I have the nagging feeling but there could be something else causing the fatigue from a medical standpoint. Maybe it's the depression, but what if it's not? It's kind of like a case of which came first the chicken or the egg. Was the depression starting which caused her to become more fatigued or is it possible that being fatigued and not being able to play the sport that she loves and the way in which she wants to caused her to become depressed? I just don't know. Or could it just be the culmination of not enough sleep not an adequate diet not enough hydration, Etc? Or combination of everything?
Has anyone been in this situation or can you help me think through this? So many thoughts going through my head and I just want to help her in the best way that I can.
Last edited by jerseygirl07067; 05-27-2019 at 09:42 PM.
Marcy
DD1 2003
DD2 2005
DD3 2009