Fibroids. They’re Not Poop!
Do you know about fibroids? Maybe…kinda (thyroids???) Let me lay a bit of knowledge down on you.
In case you’re like me and never heard of fibroids (until FKA Twigs’ Instagram dance devoted to her own experience), they are tumors in the uterus of varying shapes and sizes that consist of fibrous tissue and smooth muscle cells. Fibroids painfully afflict one in four women. More accurately up to 80% of us will get them at some point in our lives, especially during the childbearing years. The moneymakers! During pregnancy, fibroids can get even bigger, and they could lead to miscarriages. Yet we aren’t warned about them. They’re caused by an imbalance of estrogen and progesterone, and are sometimes harmless but not always and inevitably they take over our bodies. What’s more, fibroids could also be hiding cancer.
A month ago, I had three fibroids removed through my abdomen, aka an “abdominal myomectomy,” aka a c-section without the baby. I now have a 5-inch scar that will be numb for a year, my doctor just informed me. Friends who had their abdominal surgery years ago still haven’t had sensation return! No one, not even my mother who had two cesareans mentioned this possibility to me beforehand — probably assuming my doctor would. I also had no bowel movements for a week after the surgery (nothing like pulling on newly made stitches from the inside to convince you to give yourself an enema) as well as constant tension and back pain from trying to hold my body up without using my abs. Sitting…who knew? This part of the recovery wasn’t mentioned in any of the pre-op appointments. In the past six years, none of my doctors have mentioned tumors as a probability when they noticed a mass protruding from my lower belly, also known as my uterus.
Poop or No Poop?
Constipated: That was my diagnosis after three Pap smears and an annual checkup. By different doctors! Eventually I was told I have “a shallow uterus” from which the mass was protruding from. A year later another doctor at the same office ordered a sonogram — when I was definitive that I was quite regular this time. I had noticed a pattern why hadn’t they?
Three sonograms and a subsequent MRI (thank goodness for employer-based health insurance) proved my uterus had actually grown quite large — large enough to house the tumors growing inside. One spread between the walls of my uterus and one was engulfing my left ovary, enough that the organ couldn’t be seen on any scan. I came to learn this was called submucosal fibroids, meaning that it bulges into the uterine cavity. For years I’d call this tumor my poop for years whenever I would feel it protruding out of my body . My little pet poop just poking out from behind my entire vaginal cavity. But hey — biology was the only class I ever got bad grades in! Maybe I just didn’t understand how the human body worked. Or at least, that’s what the ones in charge put in my head.
Educated Guesses
Except no one really understands it. Educated guesses. That’s what our whole healthcare system is based on. Until recently, we revered life so much that we’d sacrificed human lives for the cells growing inside them by refusing to legalize a pretty basic procedure. Tumors with DNA. We take birth control to avoid this. But shouldn’t we also be trying to regulate hormones that researchers agree cause fibroids? Fibroids that could be hiding uterine sarcomas, which are the indiscernible cancerous form of these growths?
This is the tricky thing I learned when deciding how to handle these bad boys. On the one hand I wanted to keep my uterus intact in case The Handmaid’s Tale turned real and I needed collateral. On the other, I didn’t want to die because the chances of them being malignant were small. The numbers maybe have been in my favor, but the 2016 Election still haunts me. So I chose to have an abdominal myomectomy versus the much easier laparoscopic myomec-tomy, which makes a few tiny incisions to break up the fibroid from the inside using a power morcellator. This allows it to pass over time, like a period, and recovery time is greatly reduced.
Sounds like the super obvious way to go until I learned (and only through randomly discussing this openly with knowledgeable women) that if your fibroid happens to be malignant, morcellation would spread the cancer throughout your body. So how about a way to see if what it is and then decide? Nope. Still to this day, there is no test, even tissue sampling, that can accurately predict the presence of a hidden uterine sarcoma. Until you get them removed, of course, then bob’s your uncle!
The Numbers Are Wrong
Fibroids are like cysts — everyone gets them and doctors seem chill because only a small number of them are infected. They were all “1 in 10,000 fibroids are uterine sarcoma so go ahead and chop them babies up if they’re hurting you so badly!” Then in 2014, the FDA released a report that “discouraged” the use of laparoscopic morcellators. The number of uterine sarcoma in patients was adjusted from 1 in 10,000 to 1 in 352 after analyzing 9 studies on the subject. #womenshealth
Apparently we’re still learning how our bodies work (even 15 years after the human genome project!?) and not every diagnosis we get will capture the full story of what’s going on inside us. And if you’re fortunate enough to have healthcare, use it. Save for the (un)expected, especially as a woman. Luckily, having fibroids does not increase the risk of developing a cancer. Win!
Hell, this isn’t even over for me until I get my own hormones figured out, since new baby fibroids are probably growing back as I type. And my experience through this whole thing was a breeze compared to the countless stories I read online, including on Medium. One woman had the equivalent to a magnum bottle of champagne inside of her for years.
Treat Your Self
So please, listen to your body, read as much as you can, talk to your doctor (and your fellow females). At your next Pap smear, request a sonogram to get a hint of what’s happening inside your tumor store. See what you can do to balance the load now so you don’t have to give yourself an enema later.
