It’s been a while since I’ve written an update on the status of my fibroid battle. That’s mostly because I haven’t been worrying too much about my fibroids. There hasn’t been a battle to fight. My life hasn’t been all about my fibroids and how I feel from day to day depending on the size of my stomach.

For the most part I have been doing well. I continue to keep to a restricted diet of coconut milk, chia seeds, raw almonds and cashews (mostly in home-made butter form but also whole), occasionally raw peanuts and peanut butter, and kale. My restricted diet does include some other items such as ginger, cinnamon and turmeric. And occasionally a piece of salmon or cod fish. I had been having Quinoa in blended (pudding) form but I’ve had to cut that out after two episodes of unbearably painful stomach cramps after eating the pudding.

I do have to admit that in the last week I’ve sampled some tea biscuits and some crackers here and there. And even had a tiny bite from a milky way bar which contained milk. But for the most part I have been good about keeping to the restricted diet. I have been avoiding dairy and also trying to avoid gluten and sugar. And the benefit has been that my stomach has maintained the improvements seen following my 30-days stretch of avoiding solid food. I was supposed to try another 30 days off solids but that hasn’t taken yet. However I eat very little in the way of solid food throughout the day.

Life has been busy as I’ve been working hard trying to get back into the entrepreneurship game. I haven’t been allowing myself time to focus on what’s not right in my life. I guess it has helped a great deal that my stomach hasn’t been quite so enormous as back in December last year when I ended up at the emergency room. It’s easier not to focus on the fibroids when they aren’t insisting on being the center of attention in my life.

A few weeks ago I did some pretend-modeling work for one of my websites. These photos are from the session. I am sharing them to give visual evidence of how much better I have been doing in recent weeks by comparison to my situation in December.

30+ days on a restricted diet has enabled me to wear things I would not have been able to wear had I not ended up in the emergency room last December. But more importantly, I’ve been having fun with my life these last few weeks. And considering where I was at the start of the year I am thankful to be where I am at this moment.

At the start of the year I was fearing the possibility of Ovarian cancer. I was also faced with what I was being told was a potentially life-threatening situation with my fibroids. They were apparently “dangerously big”. They needed to come out and they needed to come out immediately. Today my stomach doesn’t look that much different from how it looked at the start of the year. That’s because I am on my cycle. So my stomach is presently bloated. This is something I don’t think the doctors factored in when they saw me. They assumed my stomach is always in the condition that it was in when they saw it. But I was severely bloated with air in my stomach. I was looking like a blown up beach ball due to excessive gas related to my cycle. And I was on a cycle for all the doctors visits so my situation was by no means the norm at any point when I was seen by a doctor between December 2014 and mid-January 2015.

But over the previous 18 or so days, my stomach has been significantly less bloated. I haven’t been dealing with any bleeding. I haven’t had the additional stress of doctors appointments and hysterectomy talk and test result alarms and all that stuff. I’ve been relaxed. I’ve been focusing on my goals. And the benefit has been that my stomach has been co-operating for the most part. I have felt good.

The Diet

I continue to consume a limited range of foods. Still with the coconut milk, coconut water, cashew butter, chia seeds, cinnamon and kale. I switch between cashew butter and almond butter. I’ve been making my own almond butter.

It’s amazing how much different almond butter tastes when you make it yourself. It actually tastes like almonds.

I’ve also gone back to drinking turmeric and ginger tea. I was was drinking that a few years ago when I had some success with managing the fibroid situation. This time around I am using the actual turmeric root instead of powder I buy in the spice aisle at the supermarket. I’ve been including yarrow flowers and leaves in the tea mixture. A fellow fibroid sufferer recommended the yarrow as a way of hopefully getting the bleeding under control. It has worked for her. Hopefully by March I will begin to see evidence that it is working for me.

And for the occasional dessert I’ve blended chia seeds with almond or cashew butter (peanut butter if I have no almond butter or cashew butter), coconut milk, cinnamon and a sugar substitute to sweeten.

My goal is to keep to this restricted diet for as long as my body is able to handle it. So far I am not suffering pangs of hunger. I feel well enough fed and properly nourished. I’m not feeling weak. I’m not feeling weighed down with depression. I’ve been calmer and more focused. And life has been much improved. I am in fact feeling quite happy at the moment.

It’s possible to both take yourself too seriously and not take yourself seriously enough. I’m guilty of both. But neither is impossible to fix. My mind is kind of all over the place right now. I’ve been trying not to focus too much on my fibroids for the last few days. Trying to get back in control of things. Have composed a document to present to the doctors who are recommending that I undergo surgery on February 12. It is basically informing them that I would like to make an attempt to get the fibroids down a bit before I undergo any kind of surgery. At this stage my mind is made up that I will not be undergoing surgery on February 12. The only way that this will change is if something happens that leaves no room for doubt that the surgery has to happen immediately. So I am asking the doctors about Lupron. I suspect they’ll tell me Lupron is out of my budget. Hopefully there are other things they can try aside from Lupron. If there’s nothing I’ll just have to try to see what I can do for myself. But I am giving myself at least two more months. And if nothing improves then I’ll go ahead and get the surgery.

In the meantime I’m trying to get my life back on track. Things have been out of order for nearly two months. And I’m not sure there’s really anything going on at all. For all I know this is all about menopause being around the corner. It’s a perfectly valid possibility. I’m not sick. Most of the time I feel perfectly fine. It’s pretty amazing because I’ve been consuming mostly non solid food everyday for nearly two months. And I’m only consuming what my stomach can hold right now which isn’t much. Yet I feel very strong most days. I have been trying to make smart decisions about what I consume. Trying to make sure I am getting the nutrients I need. The excessive bleeding is really the only issue. And now that I know women can have a period every two weeks when menopause is near I am less inclined to panic about the fact that I had two periods in December and I am now on my second period for January. It’s messy and frustrating. But it is possibly perfectly normal. Why shouldn’t I go with that mindset? I’m not urinating excessively. My digestive system seems to be functioning just fine. The fibroid that usually makes it difficult for me to sit has dropped enough to allow me to do a head to knee forward bend without feeling any pain or feeling anything shift in my abdomen.

Why should I go with the mindset of crisis when my body does not feel as if it’s in crisis? I don’t feel that I should. And so I will not. If something happens to change my mind tomorrow, I’ll adjust accordingly.

Last October I received an email from someone who had read some of the articles on my blog. She told me that it seemed to her that I was giving fibroids too much power in my life. Her email was very interesting. She shared her own story about her battle with fibroids. I wanted to share it on the blog because I think it is worthwhile for anyone battling fibroids to read. But unfortunately I did not hear back from her after writing to ask her permission to share the email.

The gist of the email was that I needed to no longer empower my fibroids. I needed to keep myself aware that there are people in the world who have serious problems. And keeping that in mind, I needed to try to dwell less on my problems. Which is not to say that there aren’t people with fibroids for whom the problem is serious. There’s a tendency to talk about fibroids as if they are harmless but women can and have died due to complications caused by fibroids. Even so, most women with fibroids do not have such a serious issue with it that it places their life in danger.

So the suggestion made by this lady was that I not let my fibroids dictate how I live my life. She said that this method worked for her. That she once thought she had shrunken them using natural means but that turned out not to be the case. And since then she made a decision to live healthy for herself and to be happy for herself and not factor her fibroids into the equation. In other words she wasn’t going to try to be happy and healthy in order to keep the fibroids from growing or help them to shrink. She chose to ignore her fibroids and treat them like they were an insignificant part of herself that would soon be history. And from that point her situation improved. She still has fibroids. She still gets bloated; but she’s amazing doctors with how well she’s doing given the number and sizes of her fibroids.

I have definitely been allowing my fibroid situation to dominate my life for too many years.

I’m feeling pretty good right now. I don’t know if it has anything to do with my green breakfast. I feel pumped up and energized. My green drink is kale, spinach and cashew butter blended in coconut milk. It’s not something one would call yummy; but it goes down. And if it’s responsible for my boost of energy and my present feeling of total balance then I can definitely deal with it lacking the yum factor.

I’m also pretty comfortable right now as far as the fibroids go. They’re not affecting me while sitting down. Pressing my abdomen I’m feeling other tissue aside from the fibroid tissue. I can contract my stomach a bit, which is a big deal. Because when my belly is filled only with giant fibroids I can’t suck in my stomach in the least bit.

7 Hours later…
Well, I drank some ginger tea and used Splenda to sweeten it. Either the ginger tea or the Splenda caused me to bloat severely. So I am now uncomfortable and all my good energy from this morning is gone. But I am still glad I had a few hours where I felt like I could conquer the world. Hopefully I won’t stay bloated the whole day. Needless to say I cannot suck my stomach in at this moment. The difference between this morning and now is astounding.

Apparently a hysterectomy is such routine surgery that it’s stupid of me to be worrying about the possibility of something going wrong. I love how everybody is so casual about the whole thing. One of the doctors laughed when I expressed concern about losing my life. He dismissed my concerns with a comment about the surgery not being the kind of surgery that requires making your peace with Jesus. It seems a little on the callous side to me to take a person’s fears so lightly and be so dismissive of their concerns over undergoing surgery, however routine the procedure might be. For everybody else it will be nothing more than an unfortunate occurrence if something does go wrong. I’ll just be one of the rare cases of a life being lost during a routine hysterectomy. So everybody can shake their head at me and get exasperated with me for trying to look at every possible alternative to surgery. But this is my life we’re talking about, and I’m not willing to take a casual attitude in coming to a decision about getting a hysterectomy. Being assured by doctors that it’s routine surgery that hundreds of thousands of women get every year does not obliterate my fears and concerns. I want to weigh all of my options and take whatever amount of time I need to come to the decision that is in my best interest and the best interest of my son.

I’m sure I am not the only person struggling with the decision about whether or not to go ahead with the recommended hysterectomy to get rid of my fibroids. Yes, I am afraid; but I don’t want to not do it because of fear. I want to not do it because I believe firmly without any doubt that it is not the right choice for me. Yesterday I felt certain that it was not the right choice. Today, I am reminding myself that I ended up in the emergency room because I injured myself working out. And the injury happened because the fibroids got in the way while I was doing squats. I started bleeding suddenly in the middle of doing a squat. And I bled for 11 days thereafter. Part of me wants to take that as a sign that things have reached the point where surgical intervention is necessary. But the other part of me knows that there was a reason the fibroids grew out of control between August – December 2014. That part of me believes the damage can be repaired. I don’t want to be irresponsible and pay with my life to prove that I can get my stomach back to resembling something reasonably normal. But I am the one who has lived in this body for over four decades. I know the mentality is that we’re supposed to trust doctors no matter what. But I’m being asked to trust a bunch of people who have said to me that they don’t really know what’s going on. They don’t know what’s what. They just know that they see a large mass. They can’t tell me anything about it. They can’t firmly tell me it’s doing something life threatening. They only believe that it must be threatening my life because it’s so big how could it not be threatening my life. But it’s just a guess. And the only way they can know anything for certain is to cut me open to explore my insides and make on the spot decisions about what to do based on what they find when they go in.

Other doctors told me the same back in November 2010(might be off on the year but I feel pretty sure it was 2010). They said removal was urgent. By 2012 I had gone from looking about ready to give birth to not looking pregnant at all on some days and only a few months on others. So this is not a case of believing without seeing for me. I know my stomach can go down because I’ve gotten it down before and I kept it at a manageable size for at least 2 years. Then I went back to my bad habits and made some critical mistakes with my food choices. And here I am trying to figure out, do I take the risk and get a hysterectomy in February or do I try to attack this thing again the way I attacked it starting back in November 2010? Is it in fact the case that I urgently need surgery now, or do I have enough time to play with that I can work to regain control over my situation? Obviously if my life is for a fact in immediate danger the surgery will have to happen.