Doc #1 - good intentions, discouraging staff

So I found my second doc in the saga. She was a lovely lady. I still refer her to friends who aren't high risk gynocology cases. High risk pregnancies she's great with. She was sensitive and took her time. She looked at my slides and agreed that I had a submuc fibroid, meaning, it was attached and partially part of the uterine wall.She counselled me on diet, exercise, explained to me the importance of lowering my estrogen and entertaining all my myriad questions as I scoured the internet for information on how to save my uterus. She helped and supported my decision to live with this thing, and understood my hopes to wait it out until menopause, though that would be a decade or two away. I cut out meat and diary, caffiene and most white things -- sugar and white flour that add fat to a body, where estrogen lives. We tweeked my pill rx to try to eleviate the bleeding. She tried very hard to do everything she could. She ordered an ultrasound that involved what seemed a bit like a radio-active banana. She diagnosed and saw me through my breast fibroids. She once again supported me when I left those in, which had grown at the site of my previous mastitis infections and occassionally sprouted angry and swollen cysts. But I was healthy, for all extensive perhaps. I was cancer free and living my life with my fibroids.

Every now and then I would pass what looked like afterbirth. Large clots the size of gold balls. I use to call my friend and we would name them, it seemed so perposterous. But I was hanging in there. We had taken a hike once, up a mountain and to a lake on it's summit and I had bleed through my pad, down my leg, by our ascents end. I had taken commerical work, having cramped through the night and gotten a ride to set, kept erect only with Vicadin.

My friend and I took a trip, 2 or so years after they had found my uterine fibroid, two years into my semi-vegan diet (I was still eating occassional fish), to Puerto Rico. I knew that keeping my weight in control meant keeping the estrogen that fed the fibroid in control. But I was on vacation! We ate duck at FIREFLY. I felt so rebelious. It tasted SO good. The day I got back, I began to hemorage. My paranoid fantasy still tells me it was the meat, but who knows. Off schedule bleeding was nothing unexpected now, but this was different. A pad every 15 minutes. It went on for too long.

I had long been unable to use tampons, because the mass would so swell during my period that it would physically push the tampon out. By now I was carrying a mass the size of a grapefruit. The last time I had used one it had been pushed, too dry to easily remove, half way out. I was shopping at the time and had to go home, uncomfortable and feeling like the saying (get that stick out of your ass) in a literal sense. I sat in the bath and waited for the dislodged paper bullet to moistent enough to ease out.

Lying on my living room floor, because I was nearly unconscious from the blood loss, I had no idea that I should have been in the ER getting a transfusion. I had no idea I was in danger of bleeding to death. Next day I was in Doc#1's office and she was aghast. I was grey. I was too thin, somewhere around 100lbs. She took my blood. I was critically anemic. I should have had a transfusion. She THEN told me the guidelines for blood loss. Looking back I am the one who is aghast that this had not been discussed on my first visit, when my adrenaline was still so high I retained every work, researched every syllable. By this point, I was exhausted. I was put on a level of iron that made me unavoidably nauseous and surgery was scheduled. She promised it would only be the mass. She promised.

But every time I called for the pre-ops, the nurses referred my surgery as a Hysterectomy. "No" I said "It's just going to be a myomectomy". "Well, with a mass this large, it will actually be a hysterectomy". When I talked to DOC she said she would try to only take the mass, but if my life was in danger, she'd save it. I believed her, but those nurses, they scared me. They were so certain. I began to look for alternatives. My confidence had been seriously shaken.