Dec
12
Earlier this year I started noticing that my period, normally a polite and ghostly monthly presence I’m barely aware of, thanks to my birth control, was … ah, making itself known. I had to hit up the sanitary supply aisle for the first time in several years. (When did tampons start branding themselves like teeth whitening strips? “Radiant Multi”? “Pearl Lite”?) Most unwelcome, and a little worrisome, so I called the lady parts doctor to report a potential malfunction.
After a festive exam during which the gynecologist rooted fruitlessly for the Mirena strings and announced it was possible things had “migrated,” I was sent for an ultrasound, which was highly unpleasant because 1) it was the Drink a Shit-Ton of Water Then Try Not To Burst Like a Rubber-Banded Watermelon While We Make You Sit in a Waiting Room for a Good Twenty-Five Minutes Past Your Appointment Time type of ultrasound, and 2) once the familiar gooey-abdomen scan was completed, she switched to the interior method, if you know what I mean and I hope you don’t. Basically that entails having something that looks like a vacuum cleaner attachment crammed right up in your business and all I can say about that is 0/10, would not recommend.
Anyway, the good news was that my IUD was determined to be in its correct location and presumably not rampaging around wreaking internal havoc, the less-awesome news is I have uterine fibroids. Specifically, the pedunculated variety of fibroids, which totally sounds like some sort of Harry Potter spell but apparently means “benign tumors that grow on a fucking stalk, can you believe that shit? A STALK.”
My doctor explained my various options: do nothing/wait and see, have them snipped away laparoscopically, or: hysterectomy. His recommendation was for the hysterectomy, since in his opinion opting for a permanent solution was preferable to potentially having to repeat the less-invasive options.
I was a little shocked about this turn of events — like, dude, I came in because I thought my IUD was running low on anti-baby juice or some such thing, and you’re telling me I might need to have a body organ blown out the airlock? — but after talking with some folks who had similar procedures, I eventually felt ready to give his suggestion some serious consideration. Just get ‘er done, you know? Present my uterus with a commemorative plaque (“For Exemplary Service During 2005 and 2008”) and send it packing.
Then I broke my leg and that sort of snagged my full attention for a while. By the time I was back to walking without a brace and could re-focus on the uterine situation (STAAAALKS), I realized that nothing felt serious enough to warrant surgery. There is bleeding each month, but we’re talking “mildly inconvenient,” not “elevator scene from The Shining.” I do tend to experience some of the symptoms associated with fibroids — bloating, indigestion, pressure — but let’s be honest, it’s impossible to tell if that’s because of a legit medical condition or because I’m almost 43 and frequently reward myself for a kale-heavy lunch by upending an entire jumbo-sized bag of peanut M&Ms into my food-hole.
I seem to have settled on the wait and see strategy without having made an actual informed decision one way or the other, but I figure as long as my life is impacted in a mostly minimal way, I can leave the fibroids to whatever it is they’re up to in there (bobbing around like kelp, playing tetherball?).
Pedunculated anything feels like a peevish sort of health issue to have, though. Like, part of my body just went all freaky and started growing a bunch of Dr. Seuss-looking crap for no reason? Nice, Ron.
Dec
7
While I have been struggling a bit to find the holiday spirit lately, Dylan is the Dahoo-Dores singing Dilly Lou Who to my inner Grinch. He has such faith in Santa I’ve found myself in at least one awkward conversation about whether that factory at the North Pole really makes every present a kid gets, like even Amazon gift cards? (Me: “Uhhhhh so I think Santa has some ummmm strategic partnerships with certain retailers and manufacturers, in addition to elf labor …”), and he seems to one hundred percent believe that a stuffed elf is moving around on its own each night.*
Dylan’s pure joy at seeing a familiar ornament or re-watching A Christmas Story or driving around to marvel at neighborhood lights or placing gumdrops on the roofline of a gingerbread house or arranging the stockings just so, because that’s how they hang every year — if there is a bit of a meh-shaped hole in my ho-ho-ho this year, he is for sure the antidote.
I don’t know how much longer he’ll the true believer he is today, but I hope his love for tradition lasts forever.
(*Speaking of That Damned Elf, I did this idiotic and possibly/probably immoral thing the other day where I took a picture of it while holding its fey little body, which, if you have one of these elves, you know is a big no-no — no touching allowed lest you drain its powers with your stupid muggle fingers, or something — and then I forgot about the photo until Dylan was flipping through my phone and was totally horrified, like, “Mom, is Relf in your hand??” at which point I snatched it away from him and quickly deleted the image while insisting that no, no, of course not honey, that was just a photo I’d taken that morning of the elf sitting in our tree, because he was just so adorable up there, and then I distracted him with a YouTube video of a sneezing Pomeranian. Christmas: a time for magic, a time for gaslighting.)
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