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It never end. Srsly.
Apr. 21st, 2013 08:50 amIt occured to me yesterday night that while I'd let everywhere else know about what happened to me this week, I forgot to update here. So, here's the run-down of the insanity.
On Tuesday, the pain and bleeding didn't die down, and I started to pass more clots. In the end, figured I couldn't go to work, that this was too worrying to not do something about, and that I needed to go to the ER.
Where they decided to admit me.
I'd been anemic for so long that I'd developped a small heart murmur, so that was factor one in deciding to make me stay there overnight, so that they could actually give me a transfusion at last (my bad on thinking I could have improved by myself so easily...). Factor 2 was figuring out what the hell else was going on. A visual and manual examination revealed that they couldn't find the strings of the IUD, so they wanted to find out if the strings had just retracted (as is somewhat common), or whether I'd expelled the thing with all the bleeding and clots.
So up to a ward I went.
The blood for the transfusion didn't arrive until 10:30 that night, and I advise you all, if you ever have to have a transfusion, get it during the day if you can. It takes a few hours per unit of blood, and they have to check your vitals every hour, so you will not get anything resembling a good night's sleep.
I finally found out what my blood type was, though. O-. Which actually kind of sucks in many ways. O- can really only receive O- blood. All other blood types can receive O- blood, which is why they use it a lot in emergency situations, where they just don't have time to typematch and give someone their own type of blood. Problem with this is that only about 6% of North Americans have this kind of blood, and it's always in demand.
And I'm not allowed to donate! Because of the Mad Cow scare in the UK, I'm forbidden from donating blood here. Which means that not only did I receive blood that now nobody else can get, but I can't even give them a type of blood that they always need. I wish I could donate. I've always wished I could donate. Moreso now, because of my blood type. :/
Anyway... So I was initially told I'd be spending just the night. Then the next day they decided that they wanted to do a load of tests, to see what was going on. So down I go to get an ultrasound. After a very uncomfortable ultrasound in which the technician was trying to find the IUD, she left the room to consult with her boss. I snuck a look at the screen. Now, I'm no expert in reading ultrasounds, but I did see quite a few with large black sections, and some of those were marked with a yellow line and a "10 cm" notation. Okay... odd...
The technician came back and said we'd have to do a second one, because the first one wasn't clear. So I went through an internal ultrasound. Which you may have heard called a transvaginal ultrasound. Honestly, so long as you're not too squeamish about stuff going on down there, it's not too bad. I know a lot of women don't like the idea, and feel that it's a violation. My own opinion on it is that I was in pain and worried and would rather suffer a lubed scanner going up there to find out what was going on than save my dignity. And when you already spent part of the previous day with a doctor's fingers up there trying to find the strings of the IUD, honestly, there's little dignity left. The internal ultrasound allows for greater detail in the image, so I was willing to go through it.
Only that didn't work either. They still couldn't find anything that looked like the IUD. The image was still sub-optimal. Why?
The tumour had grown and was obscuring the image from both ultrasounds. 6 months ago, it was 7 cm. Now, it's 10 cm. That would be what I saw on the screen.
Now, the initial reason that Dr. S didn't think the tumour was the underlying cause of all my problems is because that kind of tumour is really slow growing, about 1/2 a cm per year. So with a relatively sudden explosion in symptoms about a year and a half ago, she didn't think it was really the cause. Now, with it having increased in size by about 40% in half a year, her opinion has changed. She doesn't think that there's anything it could be but the tumour.
But I'm skipping ahead. Since they still couldn't find the IUD, so they sent me down to get an actual x-ray.
Still nothing. Final conclusion was that I'd passed the IUD with one of the clots. The damned thing cost over $400 and lasted roughly a week.
By then it was too late to talk to Dr. S about this, so I had to stay another night and talk to her in the morning.
Which I did. We discussed things, and my options were as follows:
1) Try the UID again and combine it with birth control pills. I said no to this one. iterally, a $400 device got flushed down the crapper and there was no guarantee it wouldn't happen again, and even if it wasn't for that, that solution would still only be treating the symptoms and didn't address the underlying problem. I was wound up about this, because one of Dr. S's assistants had led me to believe, the previous night, that this was the solution that Dr. S wanted to push, and I'd gotten myself all worked up and ready to tell her where she could cram her solutions and that I wanted a new doctor who would actually give a damn about the life I was being made to live because of this. Fortunately, she moved on to option 2.
2) Radiation therapy to shrink the tumour. They would go in through a blood vessel near my groin and stick some radiactive beads inside thee tumour itself, which would hopefully cut off the blood vessels and shrink the mass down. There was a small risk to my reproductive capability in this, and then we got in another discussion about now no, dammit, kids are not an option for me. She at least seemed more willing to accept that this time...
3) Surgery to remove the tumour. I leapt at this option. Gimme! They would cut me open and remove the tumour. Because it's so rich in blood vessels, if she's not able to properly control the bleeding during the surgery, there's a small chance she'd have to remove my uterus entirely.
Is it wrong that I'm more than half hoping for this to happen? Fibroids can grown back, after all, and she admitted she has no idea what caused it to grow so rapidly. If she removed my uterus completely, there's no risk of this happening again in the future. From everything I'm researching, there's every chance that what caused it to grow so rapidly is actually her putting me on the birth control pills, then having to double the dose of them just to keep my bleeding under control. Pretty fucking sad that her early solutions might have actually made the problem worse because she so easily dismissed the thing. *fumes*
Anyway, I'm now just waiting for a surgery date. I go back to work on Tuesday, feeling much more energetic after 3 units of blood. For the surgery, I should be in the hospital for 3 days,and barring complications, I'll then be released and can go home and begin the 4-week recovery period.
I expect to sleep a lot, then read a lot.
So that's my story. Had I not gone to the ER on Tuesday, who knows how long it might have been before they figured out what was going on, and who knows how many other doctors I might have had to convince that no, really, this fucking sucks!
Everything I'm reading about fibroid tumours ticks me off, in all honesty. The fact that they can cause some really serious symptoms, but many women are just encouraged to deal with them because doing anything about them might affect reproduction. Some procedures to shrink or remove them are considered perfectly successful no matter how many adverse and long-term and painful side effects they cause, because the tumour's gone and reproduction is saved. Even in procedures that remove a woman's ability to bear children while still keeping the uterus in the body, sometimes long-term pain can be experienced, but because nothing was actually removed, it's still considered a success.
Seriously, isn't anyone giving a thought to the quality of life we're going through here? Just saw this line in a detailed article on the subject: "If you have symptoms such as extremely heavy menstrual bleeding with large blood clots or pressure on the bladder causing urinary frequency, it may be more of a nuisance than a true health problem."
Really? When you use the words "extremely heavy bleeding", that's not a fucking nuisance. That's a problem! That's what caused me to be so anemic that I needed 3 units of blood to bring my numbers up to par. Passing large blood clots caused me to lose the goddamn IUD that cost a lot of money and was supposed to hopefully cut down on the bleeding in the first place. These things are not nuisances. These things are legitimate health problems. If they weren't, I wouldn't have been hospitalized because of them.
Unless this article is trying to tell me that what I experienced goes even beyond "extremely heavy bleeding" and "large lood clots."
Problem with women reading this stuff is that if they're experiencing it, they get the idea in their heads that they should just shut up and not complain about it. Even if their lives are going to hell, well, that's just a nuisance and not a true health problem, so why even take it to a doctor?
I'm really tempted to write a book about this whole experience. Not that I want to scare people or make them panic as soon as their period is a little heavier than normal, but I want people to be aware that this shit happens, and no, it's not fucking normal!
On Tuesday, the pain and bleeding didn't die down, and I started to pass more clots. In the end, figured I couldn't go to work, that this was too worrying to not do something about, and that I needed to go to the ER.
Where they decided to admit me.
I'd been anemic for so long that I'd developped a small heart murmur, so that was factor one in deciding to make me stay there overnight, so that they could actually give me a transfusion at last (my bad on thinking I could have improved by myself so easily...). Factor 2 was figuring out what the hell else was going on. A visual and manual examination revealed that they couldn't find the strings of the IUD, so they wanted to find out if the strings had just retracted (as is somewhat common), or whether I'd expelled the thing with all the bleeding and clots.
So up to a ward I went.
The blood for the transfusion didn't arrive until 10:30 that night, and I advise you all, if you ever have to have a transfusion, get it during the day if you can. It takes a few hours per unit of blood, and they have to check your vitals every hour, so you will not get anything resembling a good night's sleep.
I finally found out what my blood type was, though. O-. Which actually kind of sucks in many ways. O- can really only receive O- blood. All other blood types can receive O- blood, which is why they use it a lot in emergency situations, where they just don't have time to typematch and give someone their own type of blood. Problem with this is that only about 6% of North Americans have this kind of blood, and it's always in demand.
And I'm not allowed to donate! Because of the Mad Cow scare in the UK, I'm forbidden from donating blood here. Which means that not only did I receive blood that now nobody else can get, but I can't even give them a type of blood that they always need. I wish I could donate. I've always wished I could donate. Moreso now, because of my blood type. :/
Anyway... So I was initially told I'd be spending just the night. Then the next day they decided that they wanted to do a load of tests, to see what was going on. So down I go to get an ultrasound. After a very uncomfortable ultrasound in which the technician was trying to find the IUD, she left the room to consult with her boss. I snuck a look at the screen. Now, I'm no expert in reading ultrasounds, but I did see quite a few with large black sections, and some of those were marked with a yellow line and a "10 cm" notation. Okay... odd...
The technician came back and said we'd have to do a second one, because the first one wasn't clear. So I went through an internal ultrasound. Which you may have heard called a transvaginal ultrasound. Honestly, so long as you're not too squeamish about stuff going on down there, it's not too bad. I know a lot of women don't like the idea, and feel that it's a violation. My own opinion on it is that I was in pain and worried and would rather suffer a lubed scanner going up there to find out what was going on than save my dignity. And when you already spent part of the previous day with a doctor's fingers up there trying to find the strings of the IUD, honestly, there's little dignity left. The internal ultrasound allows for greater detail in the image, so I was willing to go through it.
Only that didn't work either. They still couldn't find anything that looked like the IUD. The image was still sub-optimal. Why?
The tumour had grown and was obscuring the image from both ultrasounds. 6 months ago, it was 7 cm. Now, it's 10 cm. That would be what I saw on the screen.
Now, the initial reason that Dr. S didn't think the tumour was the underlying cause of all my problems is because that kind of tumour is really slow growing, about 1/2 a cm per year. So with a relatively sudden explosion in symptoms about a year and a half ago, she didn't think it was really the cause. Now, with it having increased in size by about 40% in half a year, her opinion has changed. She doesn't think that there's anything it could be but the tumour.
But I'm skipping ahead. Since they still couldn't find the IUD, so they sent me down to get an actual x-ray.
Still nothing. Final conclusion was that I'd passed the IUD with one of the clots. The damned thing cost over $400 and lasted roughly a week.
By then it was too late to talk to Dr. S about this, so I had to stay another night and talk to her in the morning.
Which I did. We discussed things, and my options were as follows:
1) Try the UID again and combine it with birth control pills. I said no to this one. iterally, a $400 device got flushed down the crapper and there was no guarantee it wouldn't happen again, and even if it wasn't for that, that solution would still only be treating the symptoms and didn't address the underlying problem. I was wound up about this, because one of Dr. S's assistants had led me to believe, the previous night, that this was the solution that Dr. S wanted to push, and I'd gotten myself all worked up and ready to tell her where she could cram her solutions and that I wanted a new doctor who would actually give a damn about the life I was being made to live because of this. Fortunately, she moved on to option 2.
2) Radiation therapy to shrink the tumour. They would go in through a blood vessel near my groin and stick some radiactive beads inside thee tumour itself, which would hopefully cut off the blood vessels and shrink the mass down. There was a small risk to my reproductive capability in this, and then we got in another discussion about now no, dammit, kids are not an option for me. She at least seemed more willing to accept that this time...
3) Surgery to remove the tumour. I leapt at this option. Gimme! They would cut me open and remove the tumour. Because it's so rich in blood vessels, if she's not able to properly control the bleeding during the surgery, there's a small chance she'd have to remove my uterus entirely.
Is it wrong that I'm more than half hoping for this to happen? Fibroids can grown back, after all, and she admitted she has no idea what caused it to grow so rapidly. If she removed my uterus completely, there's no risk of this happening again in the future. From everything I'm researching, there's every chance that what caused it to grow so rapidly is actually her putting me on the birth control pills, then having to double the dose of them just to keep my bleeding under control. Pretty fucking sad that her early solutions might have actually made the problem worse because she so easily dismissed the thing. *fumes*
Anyway, I'm now just waiting for a surgery date. I go back to work on Tuesday, feeling much more energetic after 3 units of blood. For the surgery, I should be in the hospital for 3 days,and barring complications, I'll then be released and can go home and begin the 4-week recovery period.
I expect to sleep a lot, then read a lot.
So that's my story. Had I not gone to the ER on Tuesday, who knows how long it might have been before they figured out what was going on, and who knows how many other doctors I might have had to convince that no, really, this fucking sucks!
Everything I'm reading about fibroid tumours ticks me off, in all honesty. The fact that they can cause some really serious symptoms, but many women are just encouraged to deal with them because doing anything about them might affect reproduction. Some procedures to shrink or remove them are considered perfectly successful no matter how many adverse and long-term and painful side effects they cause, because the tumour's gone and reproduction is saved. Even in procedures that remove a woman's ability to bear children while still keeping the uterus in the body, sometimes long-term pain can be experienced, but because nothing was actually removed, it's still considered a success.
Seriously, isn't anyone giving a thought to the quality of life we're going through here? Just saw this line in a detailed article on the subject: "If you have symptoms such as extremely heavy menstrual bleeding with large blood clots or pressure on the bladder causing urinary frequency, it may be more of a nuisance than a true health problem."
Really? When you use the words "extremely heavy bleeding", that's not a fucking nuisance. That's a problem! That's what caused me to be so anemic that I needed 3 units of blood to bring my numbers up to par. Passing large blood clots caused me to lose the goddamn IUD that cost a lot of money and was supposed to hopefully cut down on the bleeding in the first place. These things are not nuisances. These things are legitimate health problems. If they weren't, I wouldn't have been hospitalized because of them.
Unless this article is trying to tell me that what I experienced goes even beyond "extremely heavy bleeding" and "large lood clots."
Problem with women reading this stuff is that if they're experiencing it, they get the idea in their heads that they should just shut up and not complain about it. Even if their lives are going to hell, well, that's just a nuisance and not a true health problem, so why even take it to a doctor?
I'm really tempted to write a book about this whole experience. Not that I want to scare people or make them panic as soon as their period is a little heavier than normal, but I want people to be aware that this shit happens, and no, it's not fucking normal!