Wednesday, September 5, 2012
One week post-op
These pictures were taken today, Wednesday September 5th, one week post-op. I have been walking up to 12 blocks every day (I like to shuffle up to the store for a green juice in the morning. In my yoga pants and handmade organic sustainable shoes. Don't judge me), and I have left the house to go to a movie once and sushi once, but other than that I have been very very good about staying in bed or at least in a chair, napping, reading, intertubing, or watching TV series on my Nexus 7 tablet, which I've started referring to as my "movie" because, shamefully, that's pretty much all I use it for. Last night I slept through the night for the first time, and also skipped the oxycodone and halved my dose of Tylenol. So far, so good!
Day Six
On Monday, September 3, I noticed that the bruising had faded significantly, and also that it seemed like I was a bit less bloated.
Cuteness break
This is my dog Nina. She was so happy when I came home from the hospital that she curled up like this on my bed and didn't move all night:
Just goofing around
On my second day home, September 1st 2012, some friends came over and took my dog for a walk. They took me for a shuffle around the block too, and then after they left, bored and loopy from pain medications and inspired by a comment a friend made about the surgical tape looking like a sinister smile, I drew eyes on my belly, took pictures, and texted them to various people I knew. Then I posted them to Facebook, because nothing's a better idea than sharing images of your traumatized mons pubis with your extended network.
This one's a jumping spider:
First pics post-op
I went in for surgery early in the morning on Wednesday August 29th, 2012, and came home on the evening of Friday, August 31st. These are the pictures I took that day. What was immediately obvious (and astonishing) to me was how different my shape was already; I was swollen and bloated from surgery, but rather than having a high, round belly that looked pregnant, I had the low, swollen belly I remembered from immediately postpartum with my deliveries. The attending surgeon described my uterus as being "enormous" and said that it "looked like an octopus"; the resident surgeon laughed and said she thought it looked more like a squid. Both agreed that I should expect to find myself very bruised, as it was far larger than the six-inch incision and they had to, in their words, "really wrestle to get it out". Gross.
The word "hut" is funny. It just is.
All right. So here is the story of my fibroids, from my perspective (you'll have to contact them for their perspective, which might be a challenge because they're somewhere at OHSU, possibly an incinerator).
About 15 years ago when I was having an ultrasound with my first child, the tech said "Did you know you have a fibroid?"
"Nope" I said.
"Oh. OK".
That, more or less, was the end of my medical discussion about fibroids for a while. A doctor here and there may have asked whether I'd had trouble with my pregnancies (the answer was no) but for the most part, they just sort of hung out in there not doing much of anything or causing a scene.
Until, eventually, they started growing, and growing, and doing the kinds of things that growing fibroids do, which, if you're reading this, you are probably quite familiar with, like making me bleed torrentially for weeks on end and pressing on my bladder, bowels, and other guts, and also making me look about five months pregnant (I'm talking second pregnancy here, where you show the second you miss a period, not the first one where you don't start showing for seven months) and cramping and etc. etc. I couldn't run anymore, my energy was low, I was unhappy with my body.
So, to cut to the chase, I decided to get a hysterectomy. I looked at lots of options, and some of them, like uterine artery embolization, might have been appealing if I'd caught this (and had insurance coverage) early on. But I hadn't had insurance coverage, and in fact spent about a year wondering if I was dying of cancer before getting it... but that's a different story. I was getting a hysterectomy, and the one thing that I couldn't find online was before and after pictures. So, a few weeks before my surgery, I decided to take a couple of snapshots of the belly I hated, and to continue to take pictures throughout my recovery. Here are the pre-op shots taken August 5, 2012 (note the umbilical hernia, always present but exacerbated by the fibroid bulk):
All right. So here is the story of my fibroids, from my perspective (you'll have to contact them for their perspective, which might be a challenge because they're somewhere at OHSU, possibly an incinerator).
About 15 years ago when I was having an ultrasound with my first child, the tech said "Did you know you have a fibroid?"
"Nope" I said.
"Oh. OK".
That, more or less, was the end of my medical discussion about fibroids for a while. A doctor here and there may have asked whether I'd had trouble with my pregnancies (the answer was no) but for the most part, they just sort of hung out in there not doing much of anything or causing a scene.
Until, eventually, they started growing, and growing, and doing the kinds of things that growing fibroids do, which, if you're reading this, you are probably quite familiar with, like making me bleed torrentially for weeks on end and pressing on my bladder, bowels, and other guts, and also making me look about five months pregnant (I'm talking second pregnancy here, where you show the second you miss a period, not the first one where you don't start showing for seven months) and cramping and etc. etc. I couldn't run anymore, my energy was low, I was unhappy with my body.
So, to cut to the chase, I decided to get a hysterectomy. I looked at lots of options, and some of them, like uterine artery embolization, might have been appealing if I'd caught this (and had insurance coverage) early on. But I hadn't had insurance coverage, and in fact spent about a year wondering if I was dying of cancer before getting it... but that's a different story. I was getting a hysterectomy, and the one thing that I couldn't find online was before and after pictures. So, a few weeks before my surgery, I decided to take a couple of snapshots of the belly I hated, and to continue to take pictures throughout my recovery. Here are the pre-op shots taken August 5, 2012 (note the umbilical hernia, always present but exacerbated by the fibroid bulk):
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