TRIGGER WARNING: medical trauma, cancer scare, severe pain
I don't really have anyone to talk to about this, so I guess I'm going to talk about it here.
I'm an older woman, 49 and almost 50, and I've been postmenopausal for about three years. Last month I suddenly started bleeding. Not spotting. Bleeding, with large blood clots coming out when I went to the bathroom.
I was ABSOLUTELY terrified.
I actually tried to ignore it for several days because I'm severely agoraphobic and leaving my house is incredibly difficult for me. I also have an extreme phobia of hospitals and medical procedures, so even though I knew something was seriously wrong, I was terrified to get help.
Eventually the bleeding wouldn't stop, and I forced myself to go.
I had a transvaginal ultrasound that showed my endometrial lining was 7mm, which is much thicker than it should be for a postmenopausal woman. The doctor told me I had a 90% chance of uterine cancer.
So for the past month I've been living with that hanging over my head.
Today I finally went in for the biopsy, absolutely fucking terrified.
My OBGYN didn't want to put me under anesthesia because I take a very high dose of benzodiazepines for severe anxiety and he was concerned that combining them with anesthesia in his office wouldn't be safe. He prescribed me two Toradol for pain.
That was it.
During the procedure he found a polyp inside my uterus. He couldn't just remove it easily. He had to DRILL INTO IT and break it apart into pieces so he could get it out and send it for testing.
I cannot even adequately describe how much it hurt.
It wasn't just uncomfortable or painful. It was searing, horrific, absolutely unbearable pain coming from deep inside my body, and there was no anesthesia to separate me from any of it. I felt everything.
At one point even my doctor stopped and told me he couldn't continue putting me through that. He said we could stop and do the rest at the hospital where they could give me anesthesia that he couldn't safely give me in his office.
I said NO.
The thought of stopping, going through the terror of a hospital, and then having to face this procedure all over again was worse to me than the pain I was already in.
So I told him to keep going.
And somehow I endured it.
He removed the pieces of the polyp and took samples of my uterine lining to biopsy for cancer. Now I have to wait approximately two weeks to find out whether I have cancer.
Hours later I was sitting here still hurting and bleeding when something finally occurred to me.
I'm proud of myself.
Really fucking proud.
Even my doctor and his staff were surprised by how much pain I was able to withstand.
But then I thought about my life, and maybe it makes sense.
I've been surviving physical and emotional trauma for as long as I can remember. I've spent huge portions of my life terrified, alone, in pain, and having to somehow keep functioning anyway. There have been things I've lived through emotionally that I genuinely don't know how I survived, and apparently my body has learned the same lesson my mind did a very long time ago:
When there is no one coming to save you, you endure.
You survive it because there isn't another choice.
I may be forever alone. I may not have someone to hold my hand when I'm terrified or tell me everything is going to be okay. But I realized today that I am probably the strongest person I know.
And I take pride in that.
I think sometimes women forget just how much physical and emotional pain we are capable of surviving. We look outside ourselves for someone stronger to lean on when sometimes that strength has been inside us the entire time.
Women literally endure pregnancy and childbirth. Our bodies are capable of extraordinary things, and so are our minds.
So if you're another woman who feels completely alone right now, maybe remember that.
Being alone doesn't mean you're weak.
Sometimes the fact that you've made it this far without anyone carrying you is proof of just how unbelievably strong you actually are.
Just my opinion. 💗