The Operation

I was asleep.

I can only tell you what they told me.

The surgery went well. They found no involvement of my bowels or kidneys or bladder with the tumors (sometimes they can fuse together and teasing them apart during the operation can injure them and cause bleeding and later scarring).

The tumors were surprisingly large and curious enough that the doctors were intrigued by the strange protrusions. I guess the mine were intermural tumors, which are embedded in the muscle wall of the uterus - but they just kept growing and pushing all the boundaries of my uterus in different directions. And some of those tumors had other growing on top of them so it was just a huge bumpy mess.

At the end of the operation, after I was sewed up and they were going to wheel me out to recovery, they woke me up. I remember seeing a clear/white plastic rectangular bin and at the bottom were two large masses. They were light pink with darker red patches too them, actually, much lighter than I expected, like a tongue or gums or something. They looked hard and dense. The smaller one was irregular and about the size of a baseball and the large thing was long and about as big around as the first and kind of twisted at the bottom of the bucket.

Of course I didn't know what this was. I was in recovery and asked the recovery nurse if they had actually showed that to me or if I dreamed it and she confirmed it all.

The weirdest part is the thought that all this crap was inside me. An eggplant and a baseball and a bunch of other little bumps and protrusions off of those. That's a huge mass! And to be so asymptomatic! Just some pressure, but no real pain. But I know that they were continuing to grow and if I left them there, they surely would have caused some serious trouble.

Posted by Elizabeth M. on August 9, 2004 10:28 AM