Home Journal Did my bad marriage give me fibroids?

Did my bad marriage give me fibroids?

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I’ve read all the reasons they say some women get fibroids.

Being Overweight – This doesn’t apply to me. I was always thin although I’ll admit that I gained some weight for a brief period after turning 33. I went from being underweight to being normal weight. For most of my life I’ve had a body image problem. I didn’t feel good about myself unless I was sickly thin, so the weight I gained when I was 33 was a problem for me even though I was still small. I couldn’t appreciate that it was better to be healthy than to continue in the lifestyle of starving myself to be thin, so I went back to my old habits to lose the weight; but at around age 38 I gained weight again and from that age until age 41 I kept going up and down in weight and at one point was actually registering on the BMI calculator as overweight for my age and height. Things have been more balanced for the last couple of years. I am not the underweight girl who used to starve herself to stay thin. I am at the mid-low end of normal weight meaning, if I do a 5 day fast I become underweight. If I go crazy and eat a lot for a 5 day period I reach the middle level of normal weight. The middle level of normal weight is where you’re not going to wonder if I have some sort of illness that emaciates me; but you’ll probably still consider me a relatively small person. So the “overweight” factor doesn’t apply for me as far as figuring out the reason I have fibroids.

Being an African American female
– I find this bogus. Yes, I am an African American female; but I reject the idea that this predisposes me to developing fibroids. I don’t see enough African American females walking around with fibroids to convince me that being a black woman makes me more likely to get them.

Fibroids run in the family
– This is definitely true for me. My grandmother had fibroids. My mother tells me she (my grandmother) had a hysterectomy because of her fibroids and the problems they were causing her. My mother also had fibroids but lived with hers. I believe after menopause hers appeared to have gone away. I don’t know what her situation is right now, if they came back or stayed gone.

I have 5 sisters. I know for certain that 3 of them had/have fibroids. The 4th says she has some growth in her stomach that she’s going to get surgically removed. Of the other sisters one had a hysterectomy on account of fibroids, the other underwent a uterine fibroid embolization. The other sister with fibroids has had hers since she was a teenager. They don’t appear to cause her any major problems. She used to complain when she was young that no amount of sit-ups or crunches ever resulted in a flat stomach for her, so I’ll assume she has the same problem with her stomach protruding but I don’t think it’s to the point where she looks pregnant. I don’t know about my youngest sister. I don’t know if she has fibroids or not but I think it’s safe to say genetics played a role in the development of my fibroids.

Being 35 years old and older – My fibroid problem did start after age 35; but like I said, one of my younger sisters has had fibroids since she was a teenager, so I guess you can get fibroids at any age.

But I wonder if it’s possible that emotional pain can contribute to a woman growing fibroids. When I consider all the women in my family who have or have had fibroids, with the exception of the sister who developed hers as a teenager, we all have had some pretty painful things to endure in our lives.

I know that my fibroids showed up after I had gone through some experiences in my marriage that I would wish on no woman. And those experiences were the climax of 8 years of absolute hell. I endured the kind of pain that makes you double over clutching your stomach bawling and wanting to die.

I’ve been married 16 years, and while I haven’t gone through quite the hell in the last 8 that I went through in the first 8, there has always been something to be hurt and upset about. I have to wonder if it’s possible that becoming emotionally upset with such frequency over such a long period contributed to the growth of my fibroids. Like I said, mine came into existence on the heels of a particularly difficult experience that was severely shocking to my entire system – mental, emotional and physical.

I guess at the end of the day it makes no difference how I developed fibroids. I have them. The question is what am I going to do about them? I think I am going to make it my goal to be fibroid free by this time next year. I can’t see another way to do that except to have the hysterectomy. I hope that by the time I finally get around to seeing a doctor my fibroids will be small enough to try uterine fibroid embolization; but as I understand it that’s no guarantee. The fibroids can grow back. It seems they haven’t grown back for my sister who had the procedure done; but I understand they do grow back for some women. But if it turns out my fibroids are small enough to go the embolization route I will try that first.

I’ve had it with these fibroids. Enough is enough! A former friend of mine once told me I needed to say that about my marriage. She asked me, “When is enough enough?” Maybe if I had pulled out around that time I wouldn’t have these darn fibroids now.

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My name is Monica. I have fibroids. My fibroids are large enough that they have transformed my figure into something I am still trying to learn how to live with. In the meantime while I try to learn how to live with my fibroids I am also trying every possible method I can find to try to shrink them naturally because I am afraid of the idea of a hysterectomy. I lived with fibroids from 2007 - 2016. I started documenting my experiences on this blog in 2012. On March 7th 2016 I had a hysterectomy out of concern that I might have ovarian cancer. It did not turn out that I had ovarian cancer. The cancer scare forced the hysterectomy I was trying to avoid, and so, I became fibroid free as of March 7th 2016. I will try to keep this blog up and running in the hope that it will be of some use to others going through what I went through.

2 COMMENTS

  1. “I have to wonder if it’s possible that becoming emotionally upset with such frequency over such a long period contributed to the growth of my fibroids.”

    I feel like we are the same person. I think that because of my emotional upset, I sent my hormones into a tailspin. In my gut (pardon the pun), I feel these problems were self-inflicted. I abused myself by eating horribly… on purpose.

    Isn’t it a cruel joke that as living beings we are not only aware of the reasons for our pain, but we also sometimes consciously contribute to it?

    • It is absolutely connected. And lacking a uterus doesn’t remove the possibility of developing stomach related issues due to emotional imbalance (as I am beginning to discover having fallen into a spell of depression over the 6 months or so).

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