Finally some good news in 2011

With every passing day, I feel a little bit better. Today I was able to get out of bed unassisted with only a twinge of pain in my stomach. That is quite a difference from a week ago when getting out of bed by myself elicited moans of pain. My doctor is allowing me to work from home this week and thank goodness he did (and that my company allows that)- I was getting extremely bored at home while CP did work. Turns out there is only so much tv you can watch (and that’s when we had power).

I had my post-op appointment on Thursday. I had wanted to post about it on Friday but OUR POWER WENT OUT AGAIN. I was seriously going to shoot someone, anyone. But luckily it came back on in the late afternoon and lives were spared. :-) The appointment went great. The doctor usually sees patients two weeks out so he was surprised to see how well I was doing only a week out.

Basically he believes that the reason that CP and I have been unable to get pregnant is because of the endometriosis* he found during the surgery. To recap, the doctor found three things: the fibroid, endometriosis, and a cyst.

-The cyst that he found was not a big deal (it was benign) and he removed it because if we ever do IVF down the road, it can be mistaken for a follicle.

-The fibroid was big (size of a baseball) and stretched my uterine wall. It probably would have caused a miscarriage, but wouldn’t have hindered actually getting pregnant. He took pictures that I REALLY wanted to see (because I’m weird like that) but couldn’t pull them up while we were in the office. Boooo.

-The endo was a surprise to find. I don’t have any of the symptoms (bleeding in between periods, pain during sex), but the doctor said that often times people don’t have symptoms (the one symptom that I did have was irregularly heavy bleeding during periods but that is also a symptom for fibroids too). The only way to really know if you have endo is to have laparoscopic surgery (less invasive than mine). I obviously no longer need to have that surgery as my doctor was able to remove all of the endo. I guess I was kind of lucky to already be heading in for surgery for the fibroid because I got a two-for-one surgery! Ha ha. I was a “Level 2” endo patient which means that it wasn’t too bad, but it was located in a bunch of different places. I didn’t have any scar tissue from the endo which is great news.

My doctor looked through our health records and concluded that the endo was likely the sole reason I wasn’t getting pregnant. He checked CP’s sperm analysis and although the number of “good sperm” swimming around is low, CP is producing more than the normal amount of semen and should have enough good sperm to get my pregnant. This was music to CP’s ears. It also made me happy because this is what I wanted all along….to be the reason that we didn’t get pregnant because it is often easier to fix whatever is wrong with the woman than it is to fix what is wrong with the man.

We do have to wait until the end of January to start trying again (for my uterus to heal), but my doctor said that we have a great chance of doing it on our own now that the endo is gone! In about a week and a half the Lupron will be out of my system and I’m hoping to get my period sometime soon afterwards (but who knows how long that is going to take). I’m trying not to get my hopes up too much….


* Endometriosis is the growth of endometrial tissue-which normally lines the uterus-in other parts of the body. Endometriosis typically grows in the abdominal cavity and most often attaches to the ovaries, fallopian tubes, outer surface of the uterus, bowels, or other abdominal organs. Endometriosis growths, called implants or lesions, often bleed during menstruation, causing pain. They may also develop scar tissue (adhesions) that can interfere with an organ's normal function. Scar tissue can also cause pain and difficulty becoming pregnant.