A couple of months ago, I found a lump in my breast. I wasn’t really worried, because it was one that had already been identified (along with several hundred others) as a cyst – it was just a lot bigger than it used to be. So I pulled out the number for the place where I get my mammos, and whaddaya know, I was a year overdue. So, I made the appointment, got exactly the diagnosis I expected, had a couple of cysts aspirated, and all was well and good.
Except for one thing – when they tried to fax the info to my ob-gyn, they said that I was no longer a patient of theirs. News to me! Yeah, I was overdue for that appointment, too, but come on! I had to pay a huge chunk of change to get my records transferred down to them when I moved, and now they have nothing on file? WTF?!?!?
Well, I had intended to change doctors anyway, so I made an appointment with one who’d been recommended to me and got the mammo records sent there (other records are still MIA, but that’s another story.) At the exam, the doctor was astonished at the size of my uterine fibroids – as was I. He wrote the scrip to send me for an ultrasound, and I joked with him “ooh, does this mean I can get the hysterectomy I’ve been dreaming of?” and he chided me not to jump to conclusions.
I went a couple of days later, and things had gotten so much bigger that the tech couldn’t show the student I’d agreed to let practice on me any of the markers to indicate what she was looking at. I joked that she should look at the ovaries, too, so the student could see what polycystic ovaries looked like, too. That wasn’t on the scrip, but after she saw them, she took images of those for the doctor, too. I asked her how many fibroids she thought I had, and she said at least six, but a couple were so big that she couldn’t tell if any others were hiding. Oh, dear!
Sure enough, at my followup appointment the doctor said that surgery would be a really good thing for me. Everything’s coming out on June 18th, and I’m thrilled. Moreso today than since this whole diagnosis thing started, because I’m so uncomfortable and crappy-feeling. I couldn’t wake up this morning for anything. When I did, it felt like someone was stabbing an ice pick through my left ovary, in through my abdomen and out through my back. Even now that the pain has abated, the pressure is interfering with blood flow through my left leg. I feel like there’s a stiff tube instead of a femoral artery running up my inner thigh and into my groin. My left foot keeps getting tingly, my left knee is numb off and on. I’m wishing this trip to the hospital were happening even sooner.
If I weren’t aware of this, I’d be concerned enough to go to the emergency room – it’s not my imagination going wild. The cysts and fibroids in my breasts got bigger, the cysts and fibroids in my uterus and ovaries got bigger, and the lipomas in my legs got larger – I even found some new ones (OK, probably not new, just undetectable before), so something’s going on that’s affecting all of them. I would guess it’s hormonal, so this surgery should help all of it. Too bad I couldn’t get a doctor to agree to do this before, but better late than never.