Surgery

On February 10th I woke in the middle of the night with a very sharp pain in my lower left abdomen.  It kept me awake for about an hour but after some tylenol I was able to go back to sleep.  Ross was out of town for work and I felt better in the morning so I didn't bother to tell hi about it.  Unfortunately, off and on over the next three days the pain came back at all sorts of random times of day.

Then, it went away.

It went away for over a week, like 10 days.  I figured that it was some sort of muscle pull or maybe a "groin" injury and forgot about it.

On February 26th the pain came back with a vengeance. Pain all day.  Pain all night.  It was bad enough that on the 28th I called an internal medicine specialist that I have been seeing and got an appointment for Monday, March 4th. 

At that appointment, the doctor felt that based off of my symptoms, I probably had diverticulitis - an inflammation of the lower intestine.  She sent me directly to get a CT scan.  Thank heavens!  A call later that night told me that I had a "nodule" of unknown tissue compressing my ureter, casing the pain.  The radiologist and my doctor felt that I should see a urologist.  I got an appointment for a few days later.

I sat in the office waiting for the urologist to show up longer than the actual appointment.  He seemed very disappointed that I was a woman and not a middle aged man with an enlarged prostate.  He looked over my CT scan with me and told me that even though my ureter was indeed being moderately blocked he didn't feel like it was a urological issue - that it was probably gynecological - and he didn't want to help me, even though he still made me schedule a follow-up appointment for four weeks later.

After the appointment I called Ross, pretty frustrated.  We decided that I might as well schedule an appointment with the OB/GYN who did a procedure for me last year.  I got home, called and had an appointment for the next day.

My appointment with Dr. Johnson was only 15 minutes.  He looked at the CT scan, told me that there was a small ovarian cyst in the scan as well as the "nodule" causing me pain.  He poked around my belly and then decided that I probably needed surgery.  We walked out of the exam room, looked at his calendar and scheduled an "Exploratory laparoscopy" for Wednesday March 13.

Already long story short. 
Horrible snow storm made us late to the hospital.
The one hour surgical procedure ended up taking three.

I had a baseball sized ovarian cyst that had to be removed.  The cyst and other tissue had damaged my left Fallopian tube so that was taken out.  The "nodule" was a giant mass of endometrial tissue that had to be removed as well as a biopsy of a lymph node that was inflamed.

My doctor said it was a "gnarly" surgery.  He had to add a 4th laparoscopic hole to get at everything.  He also told Ross that I was a "bad ass" for dealing with so much pain and so many problems.

It took me a few days to start feeling better and it's taken a good month to finally feel mostly "normal" again.  Minus a very itchy belly button and some sort of string coming out of three of my incision sites, all is well.

Generally speaking, I ignore health problems, hoping that they will go away.  I'm pretty happy that I was motivated enough to take care of this one and not let it fester until it became something really severe. 

Phew!