Celebrity dog ​​trainer Louise’s strange symptoms drove her crazy. Then a TV viewer gave her a shocking diagnosis just by looking at her…

For the first seven years of her now nine-year-old daughter’s life, Louise Glazebrook’s body rebelled.

It began months after her daughter was born, when her hands began to swell. “I had to take the rings off my fingers because they were so tight and painful,” recalls Louise, one of Britain’s best-known dog behaviorists and trainers.

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.”

“I couldn’t understand why this was happening,” she says.

There were other symptoms: ‘I felt disconnected and sad most of the time. When my daughter was three, and I was around 37, I went to my GP and he said my mental state was probably due to having 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 referred me for scans for rheumatoid arthritis.’

But these came back clearly – and Louise found herself ‘more or less dismissed’. ‘What still makes me angry is that male GPs put women off because they want children,’ she says now. ‘Would I have been taken more seriously, I wonder, if I had been a man?’

Then her ankles slowly started to swell. ‘I looked like an elephant.’

She consulted her GP again, this time via Zoom, as it was during a Covid lockdown. ‘I had to press my leg with my fingers, but there was no evidence of fluid retention. And yet my jeans were so tight around my ankles, that had to be an explanation.

She hardly recognized herself anymore, 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 growing like a bush. And I was tired all the time. I wasn’t sleeping well.

‘This was because my tongue had swollen and was blocking my airway. I later found out that I had the equivalent of sleep apnea (a condition where the tissue in the airway collapses, causing patients to temporarily stop breathing). I would wake up and choke so badly that I would throw up. My swollen tongue also started to impede my speech.’

What Louise also couldn’t understand was why she felt so angry all the time. ‘It was like a filter had been removed,’ 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 too much cortisol, a substance that regulates stress in the body.

“I was horrible to my kids and Kyle – the man deserves a medal – but I couldn’t help myself. I was angry and crying in turns. I also felt completely burned out. And yet I had always been happy and funny. What was happening to me?”

Looking back, she says she would definitely have had a nervous breakdown if she hadn’t eventually been diagnosed.

‘I got to the point where I could barely function. I went back to my GP and was put on estrogen patches. My periods had stopped – I was 40 at the time – and they thought I was premenopausal.’

Louise actually had a benign tumor growing on her pituitary gland, which is located at the base of the brain and is both the storehouse and supplier of the body’s hormones. ‘It was growing, very slowly, in the opening next to the optic nerve,’ she says. ‘If it had grown any faster, it would have cost me my sight.’

It also meant that Louise’s body was producing ten times the normal amount of growth hormone.

At the time, Louise was running her own dog behavior therapy practice and wrote her first book, The Book Your Dog Wishes You Would Read, which was published in 2021 and went on to become a bestseller.

That’s why she was invited to share her canine wisdom with Steph McGovern on her daily Channel 4 show, Steph’s Packed Lunch.

‘On the train home I got an email from a viewer saying she thought I had a rare hormone disorder. She gave me a list of symptoms and each one was something I had been to the doctor for about four or five times.

“So 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 get an IGF1 blood test as soon as possible to measure my growth hormone levels.”

Acromegaly results in excessive growth of certain parts of the body – usually the hands, feet, jaw and nose – and affects between one and two hundred women (and slightly more men) each year.

The cause is usually a benign tumor in the pituitary gland, the body’s “master gland,” explains Ashley Grossman, professor of neuroendocrinology at Barts and the London School of Medicine.

“The body naturally produces growth hormones to help build muscle and repair tissues. Excessive amounts cause tissues and bones to grow.”

As well as abnormal growth, symptoms can include headaches, loss of vision (if the growth affects the optic nerves) ‘and a decrease in other hormones’, said Professor Grossman, who is also an endocrinologist specialising in neuroendocrine tumours (such as those affecting the pituitary gland) at the Royal Free Hospital in London.

“There are other problems (high blood pressure, tendency to type 2 diabetes), but patients often notice excessive sweating,” he adds.

But because these changes often happen very slowly, it can take years before they are noticed, says Professor Grossman. That is why ‘it is unfortunately all too common that the diagnosis is made too late’.

“The good news is that the only remedy – surgery – is very effective in removing the tumor and normalizing the excess growth hormone, although additional medical therapy may sometimes be needed.”

This usually involves cabergoline (tablets), octreotide or lanreotide by monthly injection or daily injections of pegvisomant. Some patients may need radiotherapy to stop the growth of tumours.

Louise paid for a private test which showed she had much higher than normal growth hormone levels. She then visited an endocrinologist at Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge on the NHS, on Christmas Eve 2021.

He looked at her and immediately said, “Yes, you have acromegaly,” Louise recalled, adding, “I was so relieved that my condition had been discovered that I burst into tears.”

An MRI scan revealed the tumor to be 2.5 cm.

The pandemic’s lack of beds resulted in another delay – “I had to wait another two months. I looked and felt awful. I couldn’t work, but my self-employed insurance wouldn’t pay out because the tumour wasn’t cancerous.”

In May 2022, Louise underwent a five-hour operation to remove the tumor, which was performed by a neurosurgeon and an ear, nose and throat specialist working together.

Less than 24 hours later, her hands and feet had shrunk, her tongue was no longer swollen. “I looked normal again. And I could finally sleep undisturbed,” she says.

Before the surgery, she had dog clients booked for two weeks later. ‘When the surgeon came by afterwards and I asked him how long it would be before

I could go back to work, he said, “Four or five months.”

Before the surgery, she had to do her dog training online because her condition had become so debilitating. The upside was that she was able to continue her online business, The Wonder Club, while she recovered from the surgery and afterward.

“I felt like I had been given a new chance in life,” she says.

In addition to writing a second book for puppy owners (published earlier this month), “more importantly, Kyle had gotten the woman he’d fallen in love with back. And I had gotten Louise back. I was myself again.”

• Everything Your Puppy Wants You to Know by Louise Glazebrook (Orion Spring, £18.99).