Before and after my first diagnostic laparoscopy
1:00 PM
Before
1/7/19: It's the night before my first EVER surgery, so let me just get this out of the way...
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH!!!1!
Okay. Now that that's out of my system... Who am I kidding? With less than 24 hours until my surgery, I know for sure I will break down crying at the hospital.
I can take pain pretty well. I'm not worried about pain. This will be my first experience with anesthesia and that's what I'm worried about. My rational side says I won't even remember it, but my anxiety has had me on constant alert since I made the appointment last month.
So my high pain tolerance is part of why I'm getting the surgery in the first place. I've been living with a 5cm paratubal cyst outside my right ovary in my Fallopian tube since 2014 or 2015, I can't quite remember. It's also the same side I had my ectopic pregnancy on, so when the doctors are in there, they'll be able to see what's really going on in there.
The fact of the matter is that unless someone cuts you open to examine your uterus, you can't really tell what's going on in there. It's the only way that conditions like endometriosis can be diagnosed and effectively treated.
I don't know what kind of state they will find my right tube to be in. There could be scar tissue remaining from the pregnancy, they might even say that it's useless and take it out. I don't know.
But I do know I'm ready for this pain to be gone. Ever since high school, I've had problems with cysts. They'd go away after a while, but this particular one in my tube didn't. I was pretty scared and confused when they told me it was in my tube because 1) Ow? 2) Why is it growing there and not somewhere else? 3) Could it be more than just a cyst?
The good news is that it's probably not, and it's just filled with clear fluid like an ovarian cyst. I'm ready to get rid of it because the pressure has been getting to be a bit much this past year. It didn't used to bother me like this at the beginning—I could only feel it if I squatted down very deeply.
Now, I can't really twist my torso as far as I used to, still can't squat too deep, can't do any lower abdominal exercises, and in the middle of my cycle (when I may/may not be ovulating) it gets really bad. It feels like pressure, and once it got so bad that I started crying in the middle of my shift when I worked in Tomorrowland. My cyst made me CRY while I was working at Disney World, the most MAGICAL place on Earth.
So yes, I am glad to see it go. I'm hoping for less or no pain or pressure, and maybe even some answers to explain away my unexplained infertility.
After
1/10/19: It's been two days since my surgery. I feel really hazy still from a combination of the little bit of anesthesia still wearing off and pain meds side effects. It hurts to bend over, I'm waddling everywhere very slowly, I've cried multiple times because I'm not able to do things for myself. I think the worst is not being able to sleep on my stomach :(
One thing I didn't expect to hurt so much is my throat. It's very irritated from the tube they stuck in there to help me breathe during surgery. Or to inflate me with gas to help them see. Not sure which, but I hate the feeling in my throat so much.
Also, I was really nervous to go under, but it was waking up after the surgery that ended up being scary. Every now and then I'll have sleep paralysis episodes, but I used to have them very frequently when I was younger. It makes sense that waking up felt like a sleep paralysis episode, but it was even scarier because it was actually happening in real life. I couldn't move and I couldn't really see—it felt like no matter how wide I opened my eyes, everything stayed blurry. After a few moments, I was finally able to move my head side to side, but then nothing came out when I tried to make a noise. I tried as hard as I could to make a loud noise but only tiny peeps came out. I probably sounded like an injured puppy. Only when I wiggled my toes and tried to move my legs did I realize that I'd already had the procedure done. If you've never had sleep paralysis or don't know what it is, it's like waking up from surgery. It sucked.
1/22/19: It's now been two weeks since the surgery and I feel completely back to normal. I'm taking both dogs out now, I can bend over, haven't been taking pain meds for a week, I can lift things, and I'm sleeping much better. My incision areas are no longer tender and my doctor says they healed perfectly.
I had my post-op appointment today, where my doctor explained everything they saw and what they did. The cyst was thankfully benign, and it was almost as big as my uterus (WHAT?). The reason for my pain was because it was twisting and my tube wrapped around it. I thought back to the time the pain was so bad I cried while working onstage at Disney. No freaking wonder.
The combination of it being twisted and the scarring from my pregnancy led them to remove part of my tube that was connected to my ovary. Only one of my tubes is functioning now, which means it might take longer to get pregnant. I was extremely disappointed when my doctor told me he was going to remove it before the surgery. And then at my appointment today, he said that the cyst was likely obstructing that tube for quite some time, and that it likely was the cause behind the ectopic pregnancy.
If that wasn't a punch in the gut, I don't know what is.
I was instantly thrown back to that time of my life. What I gathered from what he said was that if I had removed the cyst before I got pregnant, my baby would be here today. It took all of my willpower not to burst into tears when he said this, but I cried pretty much the whole way home afterward.
As if hearing this wasn't bad enough, it has now been three years, almost to the day, since I found out I was pregnant. In the car, I cried because I miss my baby Micah and I wish he or she was right beside me. And then incredible guilt set in when I was done because I didn't keep mourning.
When I shared the news of my ectopic pregnancy, I touched on complicated feelings I was having at the time. I'm still grappling with those feelings, because as happy as I am with where we are currently, I know for a fact that things would be different if that baby had been born. I am always going to wish that Micah was here with us, but I know that nothing can change what happened. I guess I was really surprised that I haven't fallen down into a deep hole the way I did in the beginning. I'm really proud of how far I've come. But there's still a lot of work to do.
So this whole trying thing has become a tad more difficult. I can look ahead knowing that the pain is gone and there is less of a chance of a repeat ectopic. And we have to remain hopeful. Someday soon, this will all be worth it.
One thing I didn't expect to hurt so much is my throat. It's very irritated from the tube they stuck in there to help me breathe during surgery. Or to inflate me with gas to help them see. Not sure which, but I hate the feeling in my throat so much.
Also, I was really nervous to go under, but it was waking up after the surgery that ended up being scary. Every now and then I'll have sleep paralysis episodes, but I used to have them very frequently when I was younger. It makes sense that waking up felt like a sleep paralysis episode, but it was even scarier because it was actually happening in real life. I couldn't move and I couldn't really see—it felt like no matter how wide I opened my eyes, everything stayed blurry. After a few moments, I was finally able to move my head side to side, but then nothing came out when I tried to make a noise. I tried as hard as I could to make a loud noise but only tiny peeps came out. I probably sounded like an injured puppy. Only when I wiggled my toes and tried to move my legs did I realize that I'd already had the procedure done. If you've never had sleep paralysis or don't know what it is, it's like waking up from surgery. It sucked.
1/22/19: It's now been two weeks since the surgery and I feel completely back to normal. I'm taking both dogs out now, I can bend over, haven't been taking pain meds for a week, I can lift things, and I'm sleeping much better. My incision areas are no longer tender and my doctor says they healed perfectly.
I had my post-op appointment today, where my doctor explained everything they saw and what they did. The cyst was thankfully benign, and it was almost as big as my uterus (WHAT?). The reason for my pain was because it was twisting and my tube wrapped around it. I thought back to the time the pain was so bad I cried while working onstage at Disney. No freaking wonder.
The combination of it being twisted and the scarring from my pregnancy led them to remove part of my tube that was connected to my ovary. Only one of my tubes is functioning now, which means it might take longer to get pregnant. I was extremely disappointed when my doctor told me he was going to remove it before the surgery. And then at my appointment today, he said that the cyst was likely obstructing that tube for quite some time, and that it likely was the cause behind the ectopic pregnancy.
If that wasn't a punch in the gut, I don't know what is.
I was instantly thrown back to that time of my life. What I gathered from what he said was that if I had removed the cyst before I got pregnant, my baby would be here today. It took all of my willpower not to burst into tears when he said this, but I cried pretty much the whole way home afterward.
As if hearing this wasn't bad enough, it has now been three years, almost to the day, since I found out I was pregnant. In the car, I cried because I miss my baby Micah and I wish he or she was right beside me. And then incredible guilt set in when I was done because I didn't keep mourning.
When I shared the news of my ectopic pregnancy, I touched on complicated feelings I was having at the time. I'm still grappling with those feelings, because as happy as I am with where we are currently, I know for a fact that things would be different if that baby had been born. I am always going to wish that Micah was here with us, but I know that nothing can change what happened. I guess I was really surprised that I haven't fallen down into a deep hole the way I did in the beginning. I'm really proud of how far I've come. But there's still a lot of work to do.
So this whole trying thing has become a tad more difficult. I can look ahead knowing that the pain is gone and there is less of a chance of a repeat ectopic. And we have to remain hopeful. Someday soon, this will all be worth it.
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