For the first seven years of her now nine-year-old daughter’s life, Louise Glazebrook’s body was in rebellion.
It all started months after her daughter was born, when her hands began to swell. “I had to take the rings off my fingers because they were too tight and painful,” recalls Louise, one of the UK’s best-known dog trainers and behaviourists.
Then her feet began to hurt so much that when she got out of bed in the morning and put her feet on the floor “the pain was indescribable.”
Louise Glazebrook is one of the UK’s best-known dog trainers and behaviourists.
“I couldn’t understand why this was happening,” he says.
There were other symptoms: “I felt disconnected and sad most of the time. When my daughter was three and I was about 37, I went to my GP and he told me that my mental state was probably due to the fact that I’d had two children in quick succession (Louise’s son is two years older than her daughter).
“When I described the pain in my hands and feet, he sent me for tests to detect rheumatoid arthritis.”
But the results were clear and Louise felt “more or less dismissed”. “What still makes me angry is that male GPs trick women into having children,” she says now. “I wonder if I would have been taken more seriously if I had been a man.”
Then, little by little, his ankles began to swell. “I looked like an elephant.”
She saw her GP again, this time over Zoom, as it was during the COVID-19 lockdown. ‘I was told to put pressure on my leg with my fingers, but there was no evidence of fluid retention. And yet my jeans were so tight around the ankles that there had to be some explanation.
“I was constantly struggling with fatigue. I wasn’t sleeping well. My swollen tongue was also making it difficult for me to speak,” says Louise.
She barely recognized her own appearance, she says. ‘I looked in the mirror and I didn’t look like myself anymore. My nose was bigger; my hair, which had always been quite thick, started to grow like a bush. And I was constantly fighting fatigue. I didn’t sleep well.’
“That was because my tongue had swollen up and was blocking my airway. I later found out I had the equivalent of sleep apnea (a condition where the tissues of the airway collapse, causing those affected to temporarily stop breathing). I would wake up and choke so violently that I would vomit. My swollen tongue was also starting to prevent me from speaking.”
What Louise also couldn’t understand was why she felt so angry all the time. “It was like a filter had been taken out,” says the 43-year-old, who lives in east London with her husband Kyle, 44, who runs a construction company.
‘I now know that my adrenal glands were producing excess cortisol, which regulates stress in the body.
‘I was horrible to my kids and Kyle (that man deserves a medal), but I couldn’t help it. I was angry and crying at times. I also felt completely exhausted. And yet I had always been cheerful and fun. What was happening to me?’
Looking back, she says, if she hadn’t been diagnosed in the end, she’s sure she would have suffered a nervous breakdown.
“I looked in the mirror and I didn’t look like myself anymore. My nose was bigger and my hair, which had always been quite thick, started to grow like a bush,” says Louise.
“I got to the point where I could barely function. I went back to my GP and was put on oestrogen patches. My periods had stopped (I was in my 40s) and they thought I was pre-menopausal.”
In fact, Louise had a benign tumour growing on her pituitary gland, located at the base of the brain, which is both the reservoir and supplier of the body’s hormones. “It was growing, very slowly, in the hollow next to the optic nerve,” she explains. “If it had grown any faster, it would have cost me my sight.”
That also meant that Louise’s body was producing ten times the normal amount of growth hormones.
At the time, Louise was running her dog behaviour business and writing her first book, The Book Your Dog Wishes You Would Read, published in 2021 and subsequently becoming a bestseller.
She was then invited to share her canine wisdom with Steph McGovern on her daily Channel 4 magazine show, Steph’s Packed Lunch.
“The body naturally produces growth hormones to help build muscle and repair tissue. Too much will cause tissue and bone to grow,” explains Ashley Grossman, professor of neuroendocrinology at Barts and the London School of Medicine.
‘On the train home, I received an email from a viewer who said she thought she had a rare hormonal disorder. She gave me a list of symptoms, and each one was the result of her having been to the doctor four or five times.
‘I contacted her and she said she didn’t want to scare me, but she thought I had a condition called acromegaly and that I should go as soon as possible to get a blood test called IGF1 to measure my growth hormone levels.’
Acromegaly causes excessive growth of certain parts of the body (usually the hands, feet, jaw and nose) and affects between one hundred and two hundred women a year (and slightly more men).
It’s usually caused by a benign growth on the pituitary gland, which is the body’s “master gland,” explains Ashley Grossman, professor of neuroendocrinology at Barts and the London Medical School.
“The body naturally produces growth hormones to help build muscle and repair tissue. Too much will cause tissue and bones to grow.”
As well as the abnormal growth, symptoms can include headache, vision loss (if the growth touches the optic nerves) “and a depletion of other hormones”, says Professor Grossman, who is also a consultant endocrinologist specialising in neuroendocrine tumours (such as those affecting the pituitary gland) at the Royal Free Hospital in London.
“There are other problems (hypertension, tendency to type 2 diabetes), but patients notice excessive sweating above all,” he adds.
But because these changes often occur very slowly, it can take years before they are detected, says Professor Grossman, which is why “unfortunately, a delay in diagnosis is very common”.
Louise underwent a five-hour operation to remove the tumour in May 2022, carried out by a neurosurgeon and an ear, nose and throat specialist working together.
‘The good news is that the only remedy, surgery, is very effective in removing the tumor and normalizing the excess growth hormone, although sometimes complementary medical therapy may be necessary.’
This is usually cabergoline (tablets), octreotide or lanreotide as monthly injections, or pegvisomant daily injections. Some patients may need radiation therapy to stop tumor growth.
Louise paid for a private test which revealed she had much higher than normal levels of growth hormone. Then, on Christmas Eve 2021, she visited an endocrinologist at Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge, part of the National Health Service.
He looked at her and immediately announced: “Yes, you have acromegaly,” Louise recalls, adding: “I was so relieved that they had identified my condition, I burst into tears.”
A subsequent MRI revealed a 2.5cm tumor.
The lack of beds due to the pandemic caused another delay: “I had to wait two more months. I looked and felt horrible. I couldn’t work, but my self-employed insurance company wouldn’t pay me because the tumor wasn’t cancerous.”
In May 2022, Louise underwent a five-hour operation to remove the tumour, performed by a neurosurgeon and an ear, nose and throat specialist working together.
Less than 24 hours later, her hands and feet had shrunk and her tongue was no longer swollen. “I looked normal again and could finally enjoy uninterrupted sleep,” she says.
Before the operation, I had booked canine clients for two weeks later. “When the surgeon came in afterwards and I asked him how long it was until…
He could return to work, he said: “Four or five months.”
Prior to the operation, she had had to teach her dog training classes online because her condition had become so debilitating – the silver lining was that she was able to continue her online business, The Wonder Club, while recovering from surgery and beyond.
“I felt like I had been given another chance at life,” he says.
As well as writing a second book for puppy owners (published earlier this month), “the most important thing is that Kyle had gotten back the woman he’d fallen in love with. And I had gotten Louise back. I was me again.”
- Everything Your Puppy Wants You to Know, by Louise Glazebrook (Orion Spring, £18.99).