Health Update: A Surgery Date

Note: If you’re new here and don’t know what’s going on with my health, read this first.

I’m not going to lie: I’ve had a harder and harder time keeping up with blogging lately. My pain keeps getting worse, and I just don’t have the energy to put together a travel post these days. Thankfully, my spirits are still high, and I’m doing even better now that I finally have a surgery date.

I am so thankful for the doctor who will be doing my surgery. She’s a gynecological oncologist, so she does complicated surgeries often. I was also impressed with how well both she and her PA knew my case before I even talked to them. She spent over an hour with me, which is hard for a doctor to do.

It was rough to hear that she thinks the endometrioma has grown since my MRI. It was already at 18 centimeters, and my doctor thinks it’s likely over 20 centimeters at this point. For that reason, (and because of my constant pain) she wanted to do surgery as fast as possible. I will be having surgery exactly a week from today—Wednesday, July 20. I will be in the hospital for at least three days following the surgery. My total recovery should be about six weeks.

It’s crazy that out of the 52 weeks in the year, my surgery will fall on Christopher’s and my “Super Week.” For those that don’t know, Christopher and I were born two days apart, and our anniversary is two days after my birthday. His birthday is July 21, mine is July 23, and our anniversary is July 25. My goal is to be discharged on my birthday! In all seriousness, I don’t really care that the surgery will fall on our Super Week. My friend Chelsea once told me holidays are when you say they are, and I really embraced that during intern year. We will have to postpone our celebrations this year, but we will have another thing to celebrate: being done with surgery!

In general, I have been able to stay positive, but my time at the doctor’s office was tough. It’s hard to hear just how complicated my surgery will be and that my doctor can’t prepare as well as usual due to my endometriosis. It’s even harder to sign what the doctor called the “scary paper” that says she can remove a number of organs, if necessary. I know it's done for liability purposes, but that doesn't make it any easier. I’m an optimist, but even I found myself going down the hole of everything that could go wrong.

That said, I have faith. I have faith in God that he will heal me, and I will come out of this trial in my life stronger than ever. I have faith in my doctor, who has done this procedure many times and is both competent and kind. And I have faith in myself. This has been the hardest year of my life, but I am ready to move past it. I am not willing to let this experience define me.

I want to thank y’all for your encouragement throughout this process. Your messages and emails have meant so much to me. I’m obviously not sure what my recovery will look like, but I will try to keep y’all as updated as I can.

PS-I have asked a few blog friends to guest post for me during my recovery, but if anyone else is interested, I would be happy to have you! I have no idea how many people to line up due to the nature of my recovery process, so I thought I’d put a request on here too.