Some Post-Surgery Reflections

It must have been 2019, as that was the year I started doing really deep meditations for Apollon during my daily ritual. Sometimes, I wonder if it was earlier, in 2018 — but we will go with 2019.

During the meditation, I was doing a brief body scan, the kind that one is taught to do at the beginning of mindfulness meditation. I had the sudden sense that there was something there — a lump in my lower abdomen. It felt like an intrusive thought. It was disturbing to think about, and that kind of somatic awareness does not just happen, especially to someone like me who is well documented to walk into doors, visibility poles (yup), &c. &c. At the time, I was also very sensitive to how sometimes mental phenomena can muddy or mimic spiritual experiences. So I pushed this somatic sense away. The meandering intuitive images of planetary systems and the cosmic web, the kinds of things I rely on for poetic expression, returned. I moved on from the mental thought of lump, even if I was a bit unsettled.

During the COVID-19 lockdown, I started gaining belly size. I had always had a small belly obtrusion, or at least I’d had it since puberty. Because we were all disrupted, I assumed that I was gaining fat (even though my diet wasn’t all that different and I pace enough that I actually had decent activity levels). I started to get bad lower back pain, and towards the end of lockdown, there was a pain going down the outside of my right leg that got worse when I was active. Coming back onto campus and doing my commute was rough. It hurt a lot, all down the side of that leg. I had to take it easy in spin class to avoid aggravating it.

Eventually, I went to the doctor about it. They did a knee X-ray, and the specialist told me that I needed to do exercises to loosen my fascia. I already do yoga (a lot of yin, actually) in my apartment. It helped, but it didn’t help 100%. (I would often do legs up the wall to relieve some of the pain.) The poses I was given to do were the physical therapy versions of what I was already doing. I noticed — strangely — that the pain was always worse at certain points that roughly corresponded to my cycle’s hormone fluctuations. And my legs were getting a bit puffy. I looked at my ankles and wondered if I might have early-stage lipedema, the abnormal buildup of fat in the legs and arms, but my arms were not being impacted.

Simultaneous to this, I was having menstrual issues. Thick, tacky, old, weird blood, followed by increasingly heavy menstrual bleeding. This had been an issue since my late teens, but it was getting worse. During lockdown, the person over the phone advised me that my heavy bleeding issues could really only be addressed by cauterizing the tissue inside of my uterus, which might need to be done periodically for relief, and that the weird blood was probably hormonal. Last November, I started having pain and pressure in my pelvis. They found a huge polyp, the largest one of the practitioners had ever seen. Originally, they just wanted to do a D&C, but the person who did my surgery pre-op opted to remove the problem polyp in the office, do a uterine biopsy, and send me for a saline sonogram to see if a full D&C was necessary.

Let’s backtrack to the mid-2010s. I’d started to have problems where, when I went to bed, I needed to pee once, lay down, and then pee again. This disrupted Yoyo’s habit of laying on me when I went to sleep, and it’s when she stopped sleeping on me at all, as the pressure soon made me wake up need to pee yet again. I was also having increasing issues with bowel movements.

They found a fibroid during the saline sonogram on the outside of my uterus that was larger than my actual uterus. It was the size of a four- to five-month pregnancy, in fact — which explained how, when I had tried on a dress for an event, I had a very weird hilly bulge on my lower abdomen. The relaxing MRI I had over the summer, ordered by the surgeon I was referred to, showed that it was connected to the top of the uterus by a stalk and that it had fallen or grown downward to sit on my colon. An unholy grapefruit. (I’m using the word “unholy” in a humorous way, not a literal way.) My bladder was being pressed up against and above my pelvic bone, and my uterus was being smushed. The lower back pain and leg pain were obviously from this whole pelvic situation pressing on the nerves and blood vessels leading down into my legs, with more pressure on the nerves leading to my right side. I thought back to a moment in the mid-2010s when I had a sudden sharp agony in my midsection that I thought was some kind of solo cramp because it wasn’t in the right place for a burst appendix and it was sorta mid-cycle when I sometimes got short-duration stabbing aches, and I now think that it was the fibroid when it moved into its current location. They can cause pain like that when they twist.

She said it would be a straightforward surgery. “There are some women who come in and their uteruses look like cheese graters,” she said peppily, “but yours is nothing like that.” It would require a camera incision near the belly button, two side incisions for maneuvering, and a two-inch or so incision to take the grapefruit out.

The MRI image haunted me for some time, and I couldn’t shake it. Finally, during the week leading up to surgery, I googled female anatomy diagrams and looked at the side profile. The curve in my spine was nauseatingly unnatural, my colon forced up against it. Fibroids grow and shrink during the cycle, in addition to simply growing, in time with hormones. That’s why my leg and back pain ebbed and flowed.

I thought back to that moment at shrine over half a decade ago. What would I have said to a doctor if I had asked for an appointment then? “During meditation on a God, I felt like there was something in my lower abdomen that wasn’t supposed to be there.” I would never have gotten an appointment.

Maybe, subconsciously, that’s why I started praying to Eir a lot a few years ago.

For our medical system, I needed to get to a point at which I was in pain — or noticed that I’d been in pain, as the part of me that is really pain-sensitive is my skin, as needles and IVs and all of that are horrendously painful and extremely disturbing to feel, but the uterine biopsy and saline sonogram, which put many in severe discomfort, did not hurt at all — and have things line up to get the right kind of imaging ordered, unlike all of my years of complaints and the inadequate abdominal ultrasounds they had acquiesced to every few years. (The pelvic wand ultrasound technique assumes that adult women are having PIV sex, so it’s too big to fit for many who don’t; I was never able to make it work, hence why the imaging wasn’t adequate. The saline sonogram worked because the ultrasound wand for that procedure is smaller.) All of the menstrual issues and other things leading up to last November were not taken seriously because I had no conscious awareness of the toll that this fibroid was taking on my body or that I might have a giant polyp in my cervix causing all of the abnormal bleeding going back to a young age. Young adults are not taught about reproductive organs in a holistic way — it’s all very focused on sex. I think young people should be taught more about these issues so they can advocate for themselves at the doctor if they notice strange symptoms.

I wrote the above before surgery, and what comes now is the part I am writing after. The unholy fruit has been plucked from my pelvis, alongside two small fibroids that they found during the procedure. All in all, it was 15 x 14.8 x 8 cm of material in volume — they cut the big fibroid into chunks to get it out of the two-inch incision. So a bit larger than the expected 10 cm (well, 9.7 x 6.9 x 8.1 cm), but that MRI had been in July, and I had the surgery at the end of October. They can grow quickly.

They gave me stuff through my IV in the prep room for anxiety because I have issues with needles. Maybe that’s why I generally had a great time in the prep room and was totally calm when being wheeled back to the OR. They put amazing leg massagers on you as they’re prepping you to go under. The surgery team was friendly, and they suddenly started talking formally as I realized that there was a new cable going into my arm and I was getting sleepy. My last thought was something like, Huh, I guess they’ve started, the sleepiness must be me going under, then.

Anesthesia and my body do not get along, and the IV-given codeine made the situation worse. After taking two hours to wake up, I spent four hours in the recovery room too dizzy to stand. Fibroid surgery is outpatient, but you need to be able to pee and hold down food to leave. I successfully peed, but vomited everything I ate back up, including clear liquids, just as the dizziness was going away and I was hoping to be discharged. They had cut me off of the antinausea med Zofran at that point because I had had too much of it. (One of my coworkers, who has had tons of surgeries, has never heard of that happening before.) It was after 9 PM at that point. I waited for the anesthesiologist on duty to get out of a surgery, and she told me that it was recommended that I stay overnight. There were a few rooms in the obgyn wing left, which are private rooms, so I was wheeled up to one of those. I nearly vomited again when I took Tylenol for pain management because I did not want to risk more codeine with the nausea I was having, and when I woke up at 2:15 AM, I was able to hold down water.

Other than the surgery pain and the problems keeping food down, I felt great. My legs felt really good. My leg nerves were not part of the nerve block. The hospital stay overnight had benefits that offset the distress of vomiting and being away from home because there were a lot of accessibility features on the hospital bed that helped me get up, and the rails in the bathroom helped me pee independently. The first day at home, transitions were so much harder. They slowly started improving on the second day. Every time I slept for a few hours, I awoke feeling like I had regained some motion.

My mom brought her supplies because she’s a Wiccan priestess, and I had asked her for a healing ritual. She did one in my room the day after the surgery — I had been discharged in the early afternoon — and then, she left because she had a work thing the next day.

I have spent most of the recovery period alone. I had made a lot of congee to prep for having surgery, and my appetite was fairly low for the first few days — I still can’t eat a lot at once — so I am going through it less quickly than I anticipated. And I was psychologically prepared to be alone. When I had the Flu B in 2020 that leveled me for two weeks, there was a stretch of time when I wasn’t sure if my breathing was bad enough to need to call to see if I needed admission. The myomectomy was far less dramatic, especially since the pedunculated fibroids didn’t require tons of tissue cutting (recovery time varies depending on what you’re dealing with; fibroids without stalks require way bigger incisions into the uterus), and every day brings improvements in mobility. (Today, for example, I am able to sit at a table without extreme discomfort, and I was able to drop off my rent check downstairs.) I already knew from the prolonged illness that I’m capable of taking care of myself. It was definitely hard for the first few days. Running the countertop dishwasher wiped me out on Wednesday. The kitten screamed at me to play, but I couldn’t. My upper chest muscles hurt from compensating for my inability to use my core. Every time the lingering discomfort in my throat from the anesthesia tube made me cough the first few days was a painful experience. I had expected my mood to be way worse than it was based on the 2020 flu experience, but I surprised myself with my evenness. As you may infer from the last post I put up, I expected my recovery to be way slower than it has been.

Having a grabby claw on a pole, a pet-sitter to scoop litter for a few days, and check-ins from family via text have been helpful. I’ve also been putting flexible cold packs in the fridge to keep on hand; they were amazing the first few days when the swelling was really bad. If you or someone you know is contemplating this surgery, though, I recommend doing more arm weights leading up to it than I did. Most transitions for the first few days require lots of arm strength. And buy two sizes up from your normal underwear in the high waist version instead of one size up like I did, as the swollenness for the first few days is no joke.

What’s important is that the unholy fruit is now gone. I’m excited to bring in the new year with this health issue resolved and to be able to set goals without the uncertainty of wondering when I would be limited for six weeks (four weeks off of work, but activity limits for six weeks) and how well my stamina would hold up in the meantime. The fibroid was significantly impacting my quality of life. I’m grateful to the Gods for all of the bureaucracy that has fallen aside over the past few years to get me the help I needed.

I get tired very easily and still shouldn’t work or do extended shrine prayers (my plan is to rest a bit until midday and then light some incense with a few words; nothing very elaborate — I did a solar prayer earlier today), but I have mental energy. I’m listening to a lot of sacred music and audiobooks and watching episodes of PBS Eons.

I hope that you all are well, and happy Samhain and/or Day of the Dead to any and all who celebrate.