And this is What I'm Talking About --

If you are following any of this, you've read my whining and fussing about THE UTERUS and its many woes and trials. Surely that saga continues. Five days after the truncated "procedure" (which seems to be what we are calling whatever happened a week ago), I started bleeding heavily again. That was last Tuesday morning. I hadn't anticipated that. Hadn't been warned about it by the doctor. Didn't expect it, and it scared me half to death. I was teaching and felt there was something odd going on, but of course, couldn't get away to really check on it until lunch time (maybe someday I'll do the riff on how teacher's never have time to pee). When I did finally get to the restroom, I was just flabbergasted -- and then panicked. Called home for the phone number for the doctor's office and called them sounding, I'm sure, just thin-voiced and frazzled: that sound that we make when we're barely holding it together. The nurse put me on hold while she went to talk with the doctor. When she came back on the line, I got the whole song and dance -- "you are still going to have periods and bleeding because Dr. 'Soandso' wasn't able to do the ablation, but she's going to prescribe Ponstel for you to take every 6 hours while the bleeding is going on and that should help." Ponstel, it turns out, is a MONSTER non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug, and it does seem to help some -- why, I have no idea. Of course, just one more issue to address when we meet next week and begin the discussion of where we go from here. And I am just so wound up about what the options are. There have to be options... there just have to be.

I dreamed one night over the weekend that I died. That's how this feels to me. I want to print "SAVE THE UTERUS" bumper stickers. I feel like I need to arm myself and go to battle to protect my poor little defenseless organ from the marauding uteri snatchers...

I remember when I got that nifty package that they used to give us girls when we reached the menarche... "Now You are a Woman." All slick and shiny and sort of mysterious, it was packed with the secrets of becoming a female adult -- or so it promised: the keys to the kingdom were inside that magic box. Of course, for me, and for most of my friends the truth was something a lot less glamorous: cramps and ickiness and days banned from the swimming pool and shameful secretiveness about our bodies.

Then there was the right of passage to internal feminine hygine products... All those carefully written explanations and descriptions with their clever little diagrams and drawings. You have to wonder who spends their working lives designing all those package inserts for those products, and the kinds of serious meetings tha go on around that -- hmmmmm... But then with all of that careful consideration, why is it that no one ever thinks to tell you (especially when you are young and just getting started) about removing the cardboard tampon tube insertion thingys? Are they trying to kill us all off?

I lived through the early days of my nascent sexual explorations and the nerves that went with the fact that my reproductive system was less than well behaved in those days. The calendar was never my friend. Late? Again? What did it mean? Worry and fuss and worry and ... Of course, because I was raised the way I was, it never occured to me that maybe using birth control would make some sort of sense. Duh!

I bore two children and reveled in those pregnancies. Two very different gravid journeys. The boy child stood up the whole time, or so it seemed to me -- a tall pregnancy that pressed against my diaphragm and left me continually short of breath. Then, he moved, stately from the womb in calm and steady waves that finally broke in a tidal crescendo that left me exhausted on the shore of motherhood. His sister rode like a ripening melon, low and full and heavy. She kept me ever mindful that I was "carrying" her in the hammock of my body, and then she came storming out of my body in a rush that barely left me time to get to the hospital and into the hands of those who were prepared to catch her in her haste to be born.

No more cradling of babies these days. Now it just rocks me. At the height of my orgasms the waves still roll and break and sweep me away. The tides still ebb and flow. We've traveled a long road together. A lifetime. History written in blood and memory and joy and pain. I'm sentimental and I'm furious and I'm heartbroken and I'm unwilling to say take it when the choices remain. Not now. Not yet. No.

Then ---

While I'm fussing with that, which is enough to keep me completely wrapped up all by itself, there's more.

The Heretic has BIG stuff going on potentially too. A few weeks ago, He started complaining about soreness in His balls. Well, we didn't think too much about it at first, but it didn't go away, and eventually He was convinced to see the doctor. The first diagnosis was Epididymisisis or something like that. An infection of some tubes that wrap themselves around the inner workings of the testicles. So we began dosing Him with antibiotics and waited for things to improve and they did. Some. But not clear. Now then -- consult with a urologist who finds an enlarged and hardened prostate (although a recent PSA test was normal). CT scan and various scopes have been scheduled of the prostate and the bladder... The good news is that preliminary screening shows no cancer cells in the urine. The bad news is that this doctor prescribed an antibiotic that caused an allergic reaction and now we have The Heretic in a terrible shade of boiled lobster red.

And that doesn't even take into account the knee replacement surgery that is on the horizon in July. We can't even begin to think about that yet. Except to try and plan all this other stuff around it, schedule wise.

T is busy with her own medical things. She is trying to plan for and schedule major stomach bypass surgery like Al Roker had. She thought she had it set up, and was all set for the initial workups to start today and then discovered that while the surgery itself would be covered, none of the ancillary services are. Talk about crazy making. So she had to scramble around and start looking for a new surgeon. The wonder is, that she DID find someone, and he seems really good and well qualified and neat, and everything is covered and all under one roof and closer to our home than it would have been.

So we're coping. I think. But what a week it has been. And we are holding on to each other. Or trying to. Holding on and smiling and trying to remember that we love and so life is good.

swan