Getting Rid of Things
"Perfection is reached not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." - Antoine de Saint-Exupery
I still have twinges that having a hysterectomy was a mistake. I still get feelings that it was a selfish act, a reckless act. My condition was not dire, my symptoms not life threatening. I know that there is a chance that there will be side-effects. That maybe my ovaries won't continue to function admirably for the next fifteen years.
But I also have to remind myself that this is not the first time I've had an operation that was not generally deemed necessary.
When I was a little kid, from about the age of four, I had ear infections. Long, painful bouts of ear infections. And they weren't just ear infections, they were strep throat that got so bad it spread to my ears. It got so bad that my hearing was affected. I had to sit at the front of my classes just to hear what was going on. I was on antibiotics almost constantly from the time I was four until I was eight. To this day, the smell of that penicillin syrup they gave us just sends shivers down my spine.
As a result of these painful throat infections I also didn't eat. I was grossly underweight for my age (20%), shorter than kids my age and had a bad bone break when I was eight that was probably made worse by the fact that I wasn't developing properly.
Now, this was the mid-seventies and it was during a time doctors didn't want to do tonsilectomies any longer. It wasn't medically necessary. The doctors resisted for years. Then we moved to another state, I broke my arm, which healed very slowly, I continued to miss school and finally a doctor agreed that my hearing problems and impeded growth were caused by my constant strep infections.
The week after my ninth birthday my mother took me to the hospital and I had my tonsils and adenoids removed.
Shortly after the surgery I discovered that food was actually good! I gained weight and actually started getting taller. My hearing returned to normal. By the time I got to junior high, I was perfectly normal.
It got me to wondering. My mother is 5'8" - could I have been that tall if I didn't go through those constant infections for all those years? Would I have done better at school or made friends easier if I didn't have the hearing problems? Certainly I was lucky that removing my tonsils did in fact cure my recurrent infections. I've not had strep throat since, not one throat infection of any kind.
I've started thinking about my hysterectomy in the same way. I was not using my uterus. My uterus was causing me troubles.
I have to believe that awful pressure on my bladder, bulk in my belly pressing on other organs and my intestines, and the heavy bleeding has an overall affect on my health. That much bleeding cannot be healthy. These were not things that were going to kill me, but then again, a little bit of my quality of life was being chipped away. I couldn't be as active as I wanted to be because of my increasingly small bladder capacity. Let's face it, if anything is going to affect my longevity, it's lack of exercise and altering my diet because of bowel troubles.
Perhaps this is all just a complicated rationalization. Call it elective surgery if you want, but at the moment I'm glad I did it because it gives me a much more optimistic outlook on the next 50 years.
Any questions or feedback? Feel free to email me.
Posted by Elizabeth M. on September 17, 2004 07:53 PM
