In the meantime while I wait to see whether or not I will manage to get health insurance in 2014 and go forward with getting a hysterectomy, I have to continue to do the things I’ve been doing for the last several years to try to shrink my fibroids naturally knowing that the most I will get by way of results is a stomach that makes me look between 3 – 4 months pregnant instead of a stomach that makes me look 6 – 7 months pregnant or more.
Like I said in my previous rant, it’s been a frustrating journey; but I have to remind myself that I am the one who made the choice not to have the hysterectomy when I had the chance to get the surgery the first time I was told I needed it. I can’t blame my sisters for my choice to allow their advice to influence me to make the choice to listen to my fears and decide against having the surgery. At the end of the day both things were my choice. It was my choice to listen to them; and it was my choice not to have the surgery.
The truth is, I was afraid. I am still afraid. I am afraid that I will die during surgery. As routine as they say hysterectomies are, they also admit that anything can happen and that while death is rare, death does happen. It isn’t so much that I fear the possibility of death. It’s that if I don’t have to die yet I don’t want to die yet because my son still needs me.
My reluctance to get a hysterectomy also has to do with the fact that I don’t like the idea of having a part of me removed; but there are so many women who have had hysterectomies and live perfectly normal lives. My grandmother had a hysterectomy because of fibroids and she lived until age 80. And my memories of her when I lived with her for approximately 5 years as a child was of a strong woman. Her life was hard; but I don’t think lacking a uterus made it harder.
And my older sister, who also had a hysterectomy to resolve her issue with fibroids, assures me it was the best decision she ever made. She says she does not even remember that she had her uterus removed–it has had absolutely no detrimental impact on her life.
I’m sitting here pondering my situation. Why would I have a hysterectomy? At this point it would be entirely for reasons of vanity because I am not really suffering any major discomforts on account of my fibroids. It’s been a long time since I’ve had a problem where I can’t even sit comfortably. The fibroids don’t really bother me except for getting in the way of my appearance. Although I can’t swear that I am in good health considering I have not been to the doctor in several years, I feel healthy. I can’t say that the fibroids are causing me any major problem except for making me self-conscious and embarrassed about how I look. Maybe they also chemically contribute to my daily mental and emotional struggles. I don’t know; but health-wise, nothing serious is going on that I am aware of. My cycles are more normal these days, possibly thanks to the DIM supplements; and I’m not dealing with any of the other little nuisances such as having to urinate constantly.
So my concerns right now are all about my looks; and I’m not sure how I feel about that on principle. It’s always been a source of conflict for me, knowing that vanity is trivial and that there’s so much more to life that can and should take focus over how a person looks; and yet I have been concerned about my looks for my whole life; and being over 40 hasn’t changed that. In fact, I think getting older makes you even more self-conscious, although it really shouldn’t. I mean, it seems to me that I should be feeling free from all that stuff that plagued me in my youth. I should be free from worrying how I measured up to this beauty standard and that beauty standard. I should be free from trying to look attractive enough to be noticed by men who at the end of the day didn’t really give a damn about me as a whole human being and only care what my body could do for theirs. It was a hard journey and when I consider what I’ve been through my whole damn life, it makes me want to give myself a thorough beating for continuing to subject myself to harsh criticism and judgement over my appearance, and not accepting and valuing what truly makes me “me”. It isn’t my body that makes me who I am and if anyone should know that, I should know it. That’s been my only experience in life–to be wanted only for my body and treated like I had no worth beyond that.
But my body is part of the whole of me, and fibroids aren’t natural and normal things to have. It would be one thing if my stomach was large just from the natural aging process; but it’s this way because there are things inside it that do not belong inside it. And there is a procedure to remove those things from my stomach; but that procedure doesn’t only remove the alien growths, it also removes a natural and normal part of me. I know they say a woman has no need for her uterus if she’s not wanting children. I have one child and don’t plan on having any more children; but does that mean I’m okay with saying take the uterus out and dump it because it’s useless to me? I don’t know. I guess these are the things I have to come to terms with; because I don’t think my attempts at shrinking my fibroids naturally will ever result in getting back my flat stomach.
If I want a flat stomach I’m either going to have to get a hysterectomy, or see if my fibroids are small enough now that I can get a uterine fibroid embolization procedure done; or I will have to wait out the time until menopause hits and hope they are right when they say that fibroids shrink naturally after menopause. It seems like a long wait but these days time flies when you wish it would crawl.
