The Blob in the Cozy Cave

Some mornings I wake up in the most lusciously comfortable position in my cloud of bedding on the gorgeous island of my bed and can't force myself to move, much less leave the bed.
This morning was like that. No pain, no kinks, perfect temperature, all of my limbs and parts had melted into one wonderful oozy blob of happy.
So I laid and thought for almost an hour. It was delicious.
And this is one of the days which makes me thankful for unemployment.

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.

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.