What's growing inside me?

I mentioned previously about the ultrasound I had done a few weeks ago. I first called my doctor's office to follow up two weeks after it was done, and was told by the receptionist that the results hadn't come back yet, but she'd call me when they came in if there was anything to follow up on. So when I hadn't heard anything back by the following week, I called again. Yup, the results came back, and no, nothing on there that needs follow up, but if the symptoms are still happening, then maybe I should make an appointment to see my doctor anyway. Since I needed refills on my asthma meds too, I made the appointment. The appointment was this morning.

Yeah, turns out that my doctor's receptionist needs to be told to stop playing doctor. Because rather than the ultrasound results coming back and saying, "Nope, all's quiet here, and it all looks normal," it came back with the news of a 7 cm mass growing in my uterus.

Cue rageface. That was my first thought. That idiot sitting behind the desk decided to do some interpreting of her own and failed at it. What if I had taken her word for it and just said, "Well, it came back fine, so maybe the problems will just go away?" Or thought that if the results came back negative that I shouldn't waste my doctor's time complaining about what I'd already complained about previously? What if I'd trusted her to know better than I did? I might have just let it go and continued to suffer through my issues, all because that stupid bitch decided it was her time to play doctor.

My second thought was that holy shit, I was a 7 cm mass growing in a place it's not supposed to be, WTF!?!?

It's likely benign, my doctor says, but when he looked through my medical history and saw that I've never had a pap test done, his expression changed and he looked more concerned about it. But here's what we're sure of, for the time being:

- It's probably a fibroadenoma, which is in the muscle tissue of the uterus, and mine had started to grow out away from the wall and start taking up space in the rest of my uterus.

- The tumour is stopping the muscles from working properly, stopping them from contracting properly when I'm on my period, which is why I bleed so much and so heavily. Normally, the muscles contracting helps stop a person from bleeding out when they're menstruating. And since this process is disrupted in me, well, hello anemia and running to the bathroom twice an hour.

He's referring me to a specialist, who'll discuss options with me, but because he wants me to be informed, he presented a couple himself. One option is that I start taking a form of birth control that essentially shuts off my uterus for a while, which could potentially shrink the tumour to the point where it's not causing so many problems. A second option is surgical removal, which my doctor's not that keen on because I'm young and, despite my protests to the contrary, I might want kids someday.

Nobody takes me seriously when I say that I don't want kids and have never wanted them. People just see the fact that I'm young and female and assume that it'll all change someday. Hell, that was the reason I ended up being refused a test when I was in my teens, to check to see if a muscle in my side was severly damaged. The test involved injecting a dye that might affect my reproductive system, and in spite of the fact that my mother was there with me and told them to do it anyway, they refused because it was too big a risk. My ability to potentially pop out a kid someday was more important than the pain I was in.

That pain has never fully gone away, either. Too much activity fucks that muscle up and I end up in terrible pain and sometimes am unable to uncurl myself from a ball.

But maybe the specialist that my doctor will refer me to will be a bit more open with that. I'm willing to try the other method, and if my doctor's right, while I'm on that I wouldn't be having periods at all, but I admit I'm not too keen on it. It's not a guarantee of fixing the problem, and I'll have to do it for months and go back for more testing to see if it's working and if it doesn't I'll have to end up getting surgery anyway.

But I guess I'll have to see. I just hope it doesn't take too long to get to see the specialist. Likely I'll end up having at least one more bout of bleeding before I do, and I can't say I'm looking forward to that, but it's not like I've got much choice in the matter.

I'm not worried that I'm going to die or anything like that. Even if the tumour isn't benign, I know my options are good and that there are multiple treatment options available. It's just that after a week of crappy sleep due to my lungs being lousy, this wasn't exactly welcome news. I was kind of hoping to hear that I had PCOS, something my doctor could just write a prescription for and I could start getting treated for today. Now I have to keep waiting.

But at least I know something, and that's more than I had yesterday. I'm freaked out and upset, but I'm not fatalistic, and I know I can get through it.

Still, I'm taking today off work because I'm in no mood to listen to rich people talk about their Christmas vacations to the Bahamas. I think I need a little me-time to process all this before I go out and face the world again.

Though I'll say this for nothing. If this actually does turn out to be something serious, I am going to tear a fucking strip off my doctor's receptionist!