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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