me and my walnut

My uterus and I are doing fine now.

Though life conspired to bring care-giving full circle and I have spent much time since caring for adults rather than new children of my own, seeing the passing of someone you love is in many ways also like a birth -- like me, she was delivered from pain into a new purified life. Just not with me.

My uterus is about the size of a walnut. No symptoms have returned, and I maintain a low estrogen level with daily birth control. I now bleed only about two days or three days a month. My DOC, aka the holy spirit herself, tells me there is no woman alive who deserves a light period more than I do!

Every time I go in to see my guardian angel, my Doc, she smiles and says "I think about you every day... NO! I think about your UTERUS, everyday".

In the end, the reason for all my pain and complication was a misdiagnosis by the clinic where I was originally seen. It was no submucosal fibroid, subserous, or was it intramural (inside the muscular wall) it was in fact pendunculated myoma. A fibroid connected by a "stalk" -- the type that a embolism will kill, but the body can not accommodate for. It is not really anyone's fault -- DOC#3 herself could not believe how short and how broad the "stalk" itself was -- disguising it as submucosal. The embolism killed it and my body spent three months trying to "delivery" the myoma as if it weren't attached to my uterus -- I was basically in labor for a couple months -- explaining the dialation and the labor like pains that pain killers couldn't touch. The "liver" that dropped out of me was necrotic material -- dead stuff... quite the crazy natural wonder, a woman's body. But this journey was more than that, wasn't it?

These battles we fight, they do help us grow. They in fact demand that we grow. Though professionally I may have lost some traction because of this journey, though my daughter may continue to have fear issues as she matures into womanhood I will help her through, this journey did take me somewhere. A place where I have learned to follow my intuition unapologetically, even when it's mistaken. A place where my sexuality is an innate gift, that I am to enjoy and celebrate and fight for. A place where I know there are heroes, living (at least for a little longer, in a few cases) right here with me. I am thankful everyday for the preservation of my body, for the loving care it finally received, and for the people that came into my life,... just in the nick of time.