June 29, 2004

I'm thirty eight and live in southern California. I've never had a baby.

About two years ago I began feeling a hard mass in my abdomen.

I could feel it with my hands if I were laying down - just a firm mass that I could tell was under my abdominal wall. If I was on my stomach, it was like putting a tennis ball just below my belly button and laying down flat. I was in excellent shape - I walked a lot and did yoga three times a week. My weight was perfectly normal, my diet is decent and I was healthy in just about every other way.

My fear, of course, was that I had uterine fibroids. So my first course of action was to do nothing. I did nothing for two years. As those years went by, I noticed the mass got larger and my hardened, enlarged uterus could be felt all the way up to my belly button, with a very hard ridge right above my pubic bone.

Of course it showed. All my working out and staying in shape wasn't keeping my tummy from bulging. I went from a size 6 to an 8 and now I'm a 10. I'm 140 pounds (five pounds heavier than five years ago) and yet I went up two sizes? It was getting difficult for me to cover up the little belly and to rationalize that I'd just put on a little weight and this was perhaps something that happened when you got older.

The other thing that started happening was my bladder always felt full. I had to go to the bathroom all the time. Every two hours. And when I did go, I'd get little more than a tinkle and then feel like I needed to go again in 10 minutes. Yoga became difficult. Every pose seemed to cause pressure, and I stopped going.

Of course I had some rather common gynocological complaints too. I bled a lot, and for what seemed longer than normal. My periods were once four or five days, but had slowly grown to ten. Four of those days were what I've been told is "flooding" - heavy flow with clots, so heavy that I would sometimes fill a super tampon and pad within an hour - or would just sit on the toilet for twenty minutes and bleed. This of course lead to anemia. At one time I donated blood three times a year. For the past two and a half years I've been turned away for donation because I didn't have enough to spare.

So, after avoiding it, I went to the gynecologist and she confirmed almost immediately that it was uterine fibroids and that my uterus was enlarged to the size of a 16 week pregnancy. Later an ultra-sound confirmed the size of my uterus was 6.2 cm at its widest and the largest tumor (there are many) on the backside of my uterus was 6 cm and was pushing my whole uterus forward and down against my bladder.

The choices, as I understand them are:
1.) Abdominal Myomectomy - the surgical removal of the tumors themselves and preservation of the uterus and fertility (conceiving is unlikely and the risk of ectopic pregnancies is higher so the doctor said that in vitro was recommended if I wanted to have children). The chance of recurrence of the tumors is about 50/50 within 5 years.

2.) Hormone Therapy (Lupron) followed by a Laproscopic Myomectomy - the hormones shock the ovaries into premature menopause and the lack of estrogen can cause the tumors to shrink, making them easier to remove via smaller incisions laproscopically.

3.) Supracervical Abdominal Hysterectomy - taking only the uterus and leaving the ovaries, Fallopian tubes and cervix. The more tissue left in place, the less scarring and better the recovery.

At the moment, I'm proceeding with a Hysterectomy. Tomorrow I'll expand on this decision.

Any questions or feedback? Feel free to email me.

Posted by Elizabeth M. at 3:22 PM