Happy Return-to-Work Day?
Apr. 16th, 2013 07:58 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lighterthanairI'd be happier about it if I felt ready and capable. Honestly, I feel so nervous about it. And not just because I haven't been there for 2 months now. I feel nervous because I don't know if I can handle going back yet. I don't know if I'm healthy enough.
I'm not just BSing this. The day of the surgery seemed to be fine, but slowly and steadily since then, things have gotten worse. The pain has, on occasion, been enough to stop me from doing anything but gripping a blanket until it goes away and I can move and talk about. The bleeding has twice gotten so heavy that I've needed to change what I was using within half an hour of changing it the last time. Gross as it sounds, I'm still passing large clots.
And none of it's constant, so I don't know if this is a thing to worry about or not worry about. it comes and goes. Half the day I might be bleeding like a stuck pig, the other half might not see me shed a drop.
Remarkably like how things were sometimes before the surgery, amazingly enough.
The amount of blood is what worries me, though. Dr. S cut away most of the lining of the uterus just before she put the IUD in, so for there to be this much blood so soon might mean the stuff's grown back really quickly, or that I have an active bleed in there that needs addressing. Maybe needs addressing. Problem is, bleeding and pain are common side effects of every procedure I had done that day. The IUD alone can make people bleed for 16 days out of the first 30, according to the info sheet that came with it.
But the fact that sometimes I bleed so heavily and go through bouts of such pain makes me worry. And Dr. S said to call her if that happens. And I did. Yesterday.
She didn't bother to call back. I'm going to hope that she just wasn't in the office.
It just seems like every day is getting worse, and that worries me more than before because it's the day I'm supposed to go back to work, and things just aren't manageable. I don't know how to make them manageable. I don't know whether I should try to go to work and tough it out and hope that it gets better, or should I miss work and go to the ER and see if someone there can tell me if this is normal or maybe contact Dr. S and get her to contact me about it, or what. I honestly don't know which is better at this point, and it's pretty much crunch time.
Next time I see Dr. S, I'm going to have to push for the hysterectomy. So far we've tried 3 different solutions, and none of them are making my life any better. Birth control pills and cyklo. Double doses of the birth control pills. Scraping out the lining and putting in an IUD. And I'm still in the same boat. It's one thing for her to play the safe way and try thing after thing that might help, but I can't do that. She isn't the one going through this. She's not the one who has to figure out if she can make it to work every day. She's not the one on the verge of losing her job because sometimes the symptoms are too bad for her to leave the house.
If she wants to play the safe way, she's going to have to find a way to get me on disability while she dicks around and wears out her 'solutions'. I could handle having to wait and continuing to go through the crazy symptoms a lot better if I didn't have to worry about leaving the house.
And that's ultimately what I want. I want to know that I can go to work without thinking that I need to bring a load of feminine products, a change of clothes, and in the end I still might not be able to make it through a whole shift. I want to be able to take a bus to the grocery store without worrying that I'll be coming back with blood-soaked clothes because I bled too heavily and was away too long. I want to not have to spend a significant chunk of the grocery budget on feminine stuff. I want to know that if I don't get a good night of sleep, that it's not because I had to sleep on a towel and still ended up getting up 3-4 times due to heavy bleeding.
I want to be able to live my life again, and I can't so long as every doctor is more concerned with saving my reproductive ability than with giving me a decent quality of life.
I'm going to give it an hour. If the pain doesn't die down or if the bleeding doesn't slack off a bit, I'm calling into work and going to the ER. I doubt this is being caused by infection or perforation, but it's still unmanageable, she info sheet I got after the procedure says to do this, and I need answers and help and someone who might care about what I'm able to do now instead of what I might want to do later.
I'm not just BSing this. The day of the surgery seemed to be fine, but slowly and steadily since then, things have gotten worse. The pain has, on occasion, been enough to stop me from doing anything but gripping a blanket until it goes away and I can move and talk about. The bleeding has twice gotten so heavy that I've needed to change what I was using within half an hour of changing it the last time. Gross as it sounds, I'm still passing large clots.
And none of it's constant, so I don't know if this is a thing to worry about or not worry about. it comes and goes. Half the day I might be bleeding like a stuck pig, the other half might not see me shed a drop.
Remarkably like how things were sometimes before the surgery, amazingly enough.
The amount of blood is what worries me, though. Dr. S cut away most of the lining of the uterus just before she put the IUD in, so for there to be this much blood so soon might mean the stuff's grown back really quickly, or that I have an active bleed in there that needs addressing. Maybe needs addressing. Problem is, bleeding and pain are common side effects of every procedure I had done that day. The IUD alone can make people bleed for 16 days out of the first 30, according to the info sheet that came with it.
But the fact that sometimes I bleed so heavily and go through bouts of such pain makes me worry. And Dr. S said to call her if that happens. And I did. Yesterday.
She didn't bother to call back. I'm going to hope that she just wasn't in the office.
It just seems like every day is getting worse, and that worries me more than before because it's the day I'm supposed to go back to work, and things just aren't manageable. I don't know how to make them manageable. I don't know whether I should try to go to work and tough it out and hope that it gets better, or should I miss work and go to the ER and see if someone there can tell me if this is normal or maybe contact Dr. S and get her to contact me about it, or what. I honestly don't know which is better at this point, and it's pretty much crunch time.
Next time I see Dr. S, I'm going to have to push for the hysterectomy. So far we've tried 3 different solutions, and none of them are making my life any better. Birth control pills and cyklo. Double doses of the birth control pills. Scraping out the lining and putting in an IUD. And I'm still in the same boat. It's one thing for her to play the safe way and try thing after thing that might help, but I can't do that. She isn't the one going through this. She's not the one who has to figure out if she can make it to work every day. She's not the one on the verge of losing her job because sometimes the symptoms are too bad for her to leave the house.
If she wants to play the safe way, she's going to have to find a way to get me on disability while she dicks around and wears out her 'solutions'. I could handle having to wait and continuing to go through the crazy symptoms a lot better if I didn't have to worry about leaving the house.
And that's ultimately what I want. I want to know that I can go to work without thinking that I need to bring a load of feminine products, a change of clothes, and in the end I still might not be able to make it through a whole shift. I want to be able to take a bus to the grocery store without worrying that I'll be coming back with blood-soaked clothes because I bled too heavily and was away too long. I want to not have to spend a significant chunk of the grocery budget on feminine stuff. I want to know that if I don't get a good night of sleep, that it's not because I had to sleep on a towel and still ended up getting up 3-4 times due to heavy bleeding.
I want to be able to live my life again, and I can't so long as every doctor is more concerned with saving my reproductive ability than with giving me a decent quality of life.
I'm going to give it an hour. If the pain doesn't die down or if the bleeding doesn't slack off a bit, I'm calling into work and going to the ER. I doubt this is being caused by infection or perforation, but it's still unmanageable, she info sheet I got after the procedure says to do this, and I need answers and help and someone who might care about what I'm able to do now instead of what I might want to do later.