The story of the bed jacket

Towards the end of my lame pity party the week that my children were out of town, I decided to get a grip and make this as positive an experience as possible. Part of being in bed for weeks is needing to buy new pjs. I am a knit pant kind of girl, but I need gowns as long as I have my staples in. (The thought of that makes my knees weak...) So, Brent and I went gown shopping. Oh my word. For some reason, the Pajama gods have decided that the only thing to put out this year are those stringy silky camis. Imagine me laying in the hospital bed all willy nilly with what the Lord gave me on display. We went to Target, TJ Maxx, Marshalls, Macys, Penneys, Sears...all mumus. I have never seen so many seersucker zip up gowns in my life. Our last stop was Dillards and I finally found some cute knit gowns that I am very excited to have.

Now, for the bed jacket. If you don't know what a bed jacket is, it is essentially a short robe...a robe you can wear in the bed without getting your knickers in a knot. It is a very old lady thing to wear, but I feel this is necessary. My family has had a field day with this, but I am still looking for my bed jacket. I might have to buy online. If I am going to be stuck convalescing, then I am going to do it in fuzzy pink happiness, thank you very much!

Reality sets in

>

I have known for a good while that having a hysterectomy was going to be in my future, but as I hung up with the appointment desk, a wave of dread hit me. It was NOW. Not in the future anymore. I just felt lost. What would it be like for me?

I came home and got on the internet. (My husband loathes medical websites, by the way! He says they get me all worked up. Hmmph.) Everything out there is so general and there is NOTHING for younger women out there. My kids went to their grandparents for the week and I sulked the entire time they were gone. I guess not having them here to distract me left me be alone with my thoughts and feeling. Again, I just felt lost. No answers for me...

I have lots of friends that have had the surgery, but most are 15-20 years older than me. Most of their answers don't apply to my questions. I have a friend close to my age and she has helped me, but I just wanted to find something that I could read to prepare myself for the next months. I did find an e-book called the Happy Hysterectomy that is pretty good. It was someone helpful, but I decided to keep this blog in case there is some poor soul out there that only has this...
...to rely on. Heaven help them.

Choosing the date

I am a super-ahead-of-time-planner, so I know what I am going to do months in advance. We are going to the beach the beginning of August, and school starts August 10th. We are going to Disney World in October, so I had to be well enough by then. My surgery needed to fall somewhere between the beach and Disney. I didn't want to do it the kids' first week of school, and in order to give more a good 7+ weeks, I would need to schedule it for the week of August 17th. That JUST HAPPENED to be one of the busiest times of my year. I am on the committee of our church's children's consignment sale, , a job that takes lots of my dear friends working together around the clock for that entire week. I just bit the bullet and asked my committee girls what they thought. They were so supportive and told me to do it. So, I scheduled my hysterectomy for August 17th. The kids will have been in school for one week and we will have almost 8 weeks until Disney.

Why am I doing this? Part 2

So, I told my dr. a year ago that I was fairly certain we were not going to add anymore biological children to our family. I was still feeling decently well, so he suggested a new implant called Essure, which can be done in 5 minutes in the office with a mild sedative. Pretty much getting my tubes tied without the surgery. It sounded too good to be true. And it was...of all things, the implant contained nickel, which I am allergic to. So I thought for a while about getting my tubes tied. And then my pain returned. About 6 months ago, I just knew that it was all coming back. The thing about endometreosis is you can have a tiny amount of it and it hurt just as much as before. I talked to my dr. and he said to give it some time, plus gave me some good pain meds. He could look at it, but it would mean another laproscopy. The middle of May, I started having severe pain in my abdomen. I was so worried it was a cyst. I had an ultrasound that showed a couple of fibroids, but no large cysts. I then had a CT scan to see if there was anything. It looked good. So, I went to my dear friend Randy, who is a gastro dr., to see if it could be something there. He looked at my CT scan and saw some odd things, so he ordered a barium enema with contrast. I was very angry at Randy for having to go through that test! :) It was HORRIBLE. It showed my diverticulitis, that I knew was there, but there were no kinks in my intestines or anything. So, I went back to my OBGYN. He decided that it was my endometreosis. It makes sense. Abdominal pain, lots of tests to rule out other things, my history, etc. So, I had 2 choices...lapro again with 6 months of Lupron, or a hysterectomy. We have made the decision to not have anymore biological children, so doing Lupron again really seemed like postponing the end result. So, I came home and got out my calendar and tried to figure out how in the world I could take 6 weeks of my crazy busy life to do this.

Why am I doing this? Part 1

Many people have asked me why I am having a hysterectomy. After all, I am 34 years old with 2 small children. I am too young to be going through this, as I am told on a daily basis. well, for starters, I have spent 20 years with endometreosis. Not diagnosed until I was 26, I spent many years thinking what I went through daily was normal. I had laproscopic surgery at age 26, one year after the birth of my first baby. Nearly all of my organs were covered in endometreiosis and most of it was burned off. After I recovered from the surgery, I went through 6 months of Lupron injections, which put my body into menopause in hopes that the lack of hormones would inhibit any further growth. I was told that my best hopes of having another baby was to conceive as soon as possible. I was pregnant within a month of coming off of the injections, which in hindsight, was just too soon. My body had been through too much. I lost that baby around 12 weeks. After some rest, my dr. put me on Clomid to ensure we would know when I was pregnant again and would have high risk care from the get-go. I became pregant the first dose of clomid and had a successful pregnancy. I spent the next 4 years feeling great and having no signs of returning lesions. Then, about a year ago, I started having some pain again.