Poindexter and Vajayjay

Today I was wearing my long, puffy black coat with the fur hood, my black knit UGGs and a hand crocheted slouchy tam. I thought it was very hipster-douchebag of me, but I was comfy. But then I looked in the mirror and realized that I'm not even cool enough to be a hipster-douchebag anymore. And that my head is pointy. Literally pointy. I've always know that my head is not one that will ever look good bald, but I guess it never occurred to me that it's because my head. Is. Pointy. I thought it was the hat and tried to smooth it down, readjust it, whatever. Nothing worked. Because my head is pointy.
In other news:
My troubled female plumbing led me to have the laparoscopy which led to a removal of a hideous adhesion. The day of the procedure I stood in front of a mirror and sucked in my considerable gut to see how much swelling there was at the site. Pleasingly, I noticed that I was able to suck in my gut farther than I had been. Sweet! I didn't lose any noticeable amount of weight, but I guess the muscles are where they're supposed to be now or something. I don't know what the explanation is and I don't care. Then, today, I put on a pair of jeans for the first time in a week. (The waist is well below my bellybutton but the rubbing of the waistband when I slouch or bend is annoying.) And the freshly washed jeans yielded an extra ½" to ¾" inches of space around my waist than normal. SWEET²!
Lastly:
(One more female plumbing trouble story, bear with me, please.) One of the post-operative care instructions the nurse gave me before she sent me home was not to insert anything into my vagina for two weeks. She started this instruction by leaning in towards me and half-whispering, "Don't have relations with your husband for two weeks." This was in front of my husband. I got a few things out of this exchange. First, she didn't want to embarrass me by implying that I might actually have sex with my husband. Second, until the next part of the instruction ("Nothing at all in your vagina.") I wasn't positive that relations just meant sex. The way she said it almost seemed to imply any relations at all. No talking, even. The whole thing was just bizarre coming from a nurse. Oh. I just realized that without the second part, she may have been whispering because she was implying sex with men other than my husband was okay. Maybe she was freaky-deaky. Hmmmmmm...

My Kingdom for a Gloppy Glue Stump

From my laparoscopy, I have a cute little scar on my lower left abdomen which looks more like a scratch than something from a surgery. It hasn't bothered me in any way at all. I think this is partly because it is on part of my belly which never fully regained feeling after one or both of my c-sections. So: no itch, no pain, probably won't even leave a mark.
The hole they cut into my bellybutton is not really much bigger, and it is vertical (rather than horizontal like the other one) so it blends in with the "crease" parts of of the bellybutton.
Both of the incisions were sealed with that surgical glue stuff that they use. When they sent me home the glue in my bellybutton was a little "gloppy" looking, like maybe they were trying to make a cast of it with the glue. And the glue had mixed a bit with a bit of blood and a bit of "discharge" (which is their word for "liquid leaking from your body because we cut you open" and is supposedly normal) so within a few hours my bellybutton was disgusting to me. I know that it was normal. There was no [gag!] pus; it wasn't red or hot; there was no "foul odor" as I was warned of in the "If This Happens Get the Fuck to a Hospital" section of the instruction sheet they gave to me. But it looked disgusting. So I, of course, couldn't stop looking at it.
All of the attention paid to my bellybutton made me think of a very weird belief of my husband's. He's quite sure if someone pokes you in the bellybutton that it can just "come undone" and you can get infected and die or bleed to death. I always make fun of this and poke him repeatedly until he (half-jokingly) freaks out.
With this ridiculous story in mind, I watched in horror when, three days after my laparoscopy, the "gloppy" glue stump fell out of my bellybutton. I was quite sure my entrails--yes, this was the word in my fear: entrails--would come out of the half-inch scar, like scarves from a magician's sleeve, until I died, eviscerated for a lack of a gloppy glue stump.


PS If I repeatedly misspell laparoscopy, it is because Firefox thinks the correct spelling is spectroscopy and Blogger thinks it is spelled periscope. So fuck all if I know how to spell it.

Blahg Blerg

I haven't been here a bit. I lost a follower. I figured I'd lose that person when I started blahg-ing about all of my girl troubles. But this page is for me, so no worries. I guess...

So. My surgery.

After much worrying and fretting, I had my laporoscopy on 12 January (this past Wednesday). As expected, adhesions were found. Nothing else was found. So pretty much a by-the-book kind of experience. They went in through my belly-button, filled my abdominal cavity with gas to create space to look around and work, saw a super healthy liver, normal uterus and ovaries and a rather gross looking adhesion from my stomach to my my small intestine and uterus. They clipped and snipped and sewed--okay: glued--me back up.

Whenever I have general anesthesia it really knocks me on my ass. It leaves me a bit blue--as do the painkillers which often accompany procedures requiring general anesthesia--and pretty tired. Any kind of procedure also usually leaves my inflammatory disease more inflammatory than usual. So I have a little more joint pain and swelling than usual and a very mild fever. Since I am not currently employed I have decided to use this time to recuperate in bed. It seems luxurious and boring and lazy and needed.

My Panties

I know that caught your attention, but this is really just a TMI, girl talk post. Feel free to click away if the words "tampon" or "uterus" make your squeamish or blush. In fact, go look at this to clear those words from your mind.
My laproscopic surgery is next Wednesday the 12th. In preparing for the possibilities of anything from them finding nothing to the horribly unexpected "total hysterectomy with bilateral salpingo-oophorectomy" (removal of uterus with cervix, tubes and ovaries) I have been reading some sites' lists of stuff I might want for recovery. I figured I'd prepare for the worst and then it won't happen. (That's always been my theory and it's always worked for me.)
Two of the things I had to buy gall me. Menstrual pads and granny panties.
I find pads gross for many reasons I won't enumerate, but if I have bleeding after the surgery I will not be able to use tampons, so I bought a pack of the hated items and hope I do not have to use them. I didn't even buy the cloth kind or the eco-friendly disposables, because I reallyreally don't even like the bad, plastic-y kind, but at least they lock "stuff" into their chemical goop. (By the way, I highly recommend Natracare tampons. They're just like old school Tampax or o.b.--depending on whether you get the applicator or not--but no dioxins, plastic or rayon. And they're an ethical business.)
And granny panties? Nuh-uh. I have never worn them, so buying a "7 pairs for the price of 6 100% cotton Hanes Briefs" pack at Target was somewhat shaming for me as someone who takes great pride in not haven "given up" on my looks and clothes. Even worse? They apparently only make such things in little girl patterns and colors. There was not a pack of all white briefs and there were no black briefs at all. So now I own seven pairs of 100% cotton granny panties which make me look like a very over-sized toddler. The worst? I bought them a size too big so they will be super comfy. Lets hope this doesn't lead to something awful, like a fondness for the damn things. Right up there with a taste for human brains in my book. Scratch that. At least zombies are cool, for crap's sake.

It's my job to worry.

I was trying to remember where I had heard a quote something like my title when, for no particular reason, I remembered one of the quotes I had to memorize for Mr. Lavelle's notoriously difficult AP English final in high school. In 1990. (Looking back, I realize now that the final was actually really easy. A gift to us, the students he had made think all year long, but we all liked the mythology behind "the hardest final ever" which never changed a single freakin' question from year to year.) Mr. Lavelle was my favorite teacher ever, so in his honor:

Not tho' the soldier knew
Someone had blunder'd:
Their's not to make reply,
Their's not to reason why,
Their's but to do and die:
[Alfred, Lord Tennyson's "The Charge of the Light Brigade"; Googled only for correct punctuation]

Anywho, that totally has nothing to do with this post, but it's weird what you can suddenly remember 20 years and some months later when you honestly can't recall what you ate today.

So, "Forward, the Light Brigade! Charge for the guns!"

It suddenly occurred to me today that when I have my larproscopy on January 12th, it's possible that rather than finding nothing and leaving me to wonder what to do with this pain and other "stuff," or finding endometriosis and/or adhesions which may cause me to lose my uterus, that a third possibility is that I might lose it all. Or most of it. It honestly hasn't popped into my thoughts the whole time I've been agonizing over whether or not to have my uterus removed if they find nothing when they open me up. (The doctor said that sometimes some people find relief from pelvic pain of unknown etiology by having a hysterectomy. I won't be doing that as there are too many other things that might go wrong: cystocele, hernia, worsening of my IBS, greater surgery aggravating my autoimmune illness/inflammatory response, vaginal, vaginal vault, urethral, small intestine or rectal prolapse and, ironically, pelvic pain.)

This lead to a rather intense anxiety attack with much sobbing. The thought of taking hormones for the rest of my life, when I am not yet 40 and my family has a life expectancy of around 80 or 90 years, usually, terrifies me. I like the way I look, flaws and all, but I do not want to gain more weight, I don't need any drier or pimplier skin and I am not fond of synthetic hormones to begin with. (But the nearest bio-identical doctor is near Philly. Too far for me to travel for a doctor's appointment; I grumble over traveling to Hershey, for crap's sake!)

All of this on top of the mystical proclamation that recovery will take four to seven days to four to six weeks depending on what they have to do, leading me to wonder how employed people plan for this shit.

So, I worry, but that is nothing new. It's my job to worry.

The Scoop Which Hopefully Doesn't End in "The Scoop"

I talked to my doctor for a while on the phone today. We went over all of my recent problems, the tests results and further actions we can take. In the end I believed we've done everything which can be done without looking under the hood. So I told him I'd like to go ahead and schedule a laproscopy to check for adhesions and endometriosis, neither of which usually show on ultrasounds or x-rays. The scheduler will be calling me soon to set up a pre-op evaluation appointment and the laproscopy itself.
My decision on my uterus is this: If there is something visibly wrong with my uterus itself when they open me up, then they can take it, regardless of how bad the "it" is. I don't want to have to be opened up again because the scar tissue or endometrial tissue grew back. However, if there is nothing visibly wrong I will not have a hysterectomy. There is too much too risk for not much guarantee of relief. A uterus helps work as a placeholder for keeping everything structurally sound and without it, I feel there is too much of a chance the empty space could cause as many problems as having the uterus there what with my IBS and the inflammatory actions of my autoimmune disease and all of the other "normal" things which could go wrong.
If I do have my uterus removed, I will be asking them to take my cervix with it. I've had abnormal paps several times, so at least the idea of not getting uterine or cervical cancer are comforting ones. Many women don't want to lose their cervix for sexual pleasure reasons, but I can honestly say I've never noticed any particular sexual gain from that bit of flesh.