Health is Everything (Maybe Not Everything, But It’s A Lot)

During a routine gyno exam, my doctor noticed some fibroids in my uterus. No big deal. We’ll do an ultrasound, check them out and go from there.

The ultrasound showed lots of fibroids, but none too big, so we decided to do nothing and have another ultrasound in a year, to keep an eye on things.

The next ultrasound was a whole different experience.
 The ultrasound technician apparently is not allowed to stick the wand in the woman’s vagina, so he positions it near the opening, and the woman has to stick it in.

I didn’t want the technician to think I didn’t know what I was doing, but I was frankly unused to sticking wands inside me. So, I quickly shoved it in, scraping the skin on the way in and I’m pretty sure bruising myself on the inside.

Who knew I’d experience performance anxiety during an ultrasound?
 From there, things got steadily worse.

The technician moved the wand around inside my uterus, raising and lowering his eyebrows at the pictures like he was watching a cable docudrama.
There were a few big ones, he chirped.

Really, what do you do for big ones? I asked.

Hysterectomy, he said in the same happy tone.

Really? I said. Well, I’m never going to have a hysterectomy.

That would be a mistake, he told me, because if I did it now, the incision would be a small one. If I waited until the fibroids were even bigger, the incision would be all the way across my stomach.

It was comforting to know this man maneuvering a wand around my uterus assumed my biggest concern in all this was the appearance of the scar.


Understandably upset, I asked about how much larger they were from last year. He hadn’t committed the earlier pictures to memory, he offered, that was something I’d have to talk to my doctor about.


Of course, my doctor was away and wouldn’t get back to me for a week. So I had a whole seven days to check every Web site on uterine fibroids out there and completely freak myself out.


What I learned is that trying to shrink them with medication could prompt menopause. At 39. With no boyfriend. Unacceptable.


Having them cut out meant cutting into the muscles and never having a decent looking stomach again and God knows what else. Yes – I have a superficial streak.

Doing nothing meant eventually, likely, having a hysterectomy.



Finally the doctor called and informed me the ultrasound revealed four tumors that had grown at an accelerated rate.


Suddenly my harmless fibroids were being referred to as tumors.


Doctors talk to you about fibroid tumors in terms of fruit. My biggest was the size of a small orange. I was hoping she meant a clementine, or maybe a tangerine, but somehow I knew she meant naval – no pun intended.

The orange tumor itself did not pose a risk – fibroids are benign. It was its size and location that was a problem. It was pushing into the uterine lining, inflating my uterus to the size it would be if I were two and a half months pregnant.


All this time spent not wanting a baby and now my uterus went ahead and got pregnant on its own.



And there was a polyp in there too. Which could be nothing. Or could be something. Just a lovely menagerie of foreign bodies shacking up in my nether regions.


The more people I talked to about it and the more research I did, the more afraid I became. I hadn’t used my uterus a whole lot, but I knew I wanted to keep it. I was hoping to have an orgasm one day and it would probably be a more likely event with an intact uterus present.


When I got off the phone with the doctor it was only 2 pm. I had a whole three and a half hours to sit at work and be panicked.



Then I remembered a homeopathic pharmacist who wasn’t too far away. I called him and scheduled a consultation for that day at 5:30. I only had to make it to 4 o’clock, then leave early for my “doctor” appointment.



I sat at my desk trying all my usual tricks to distract myself from something I didn’t want to think about …news sites, horoscope sites …nothing worked. There was no getting my mind off this.


Finally 4 o’clock arrived and I rushed over to the homeopath.

He sat me down in a back room for a consultation.

He asked me a bunch of questions about my personal life.

Was I married?

No.

Did I have a partner?


No.


Was I sexually active?



Did he need to ask? No.

The problem, he said, was that my body did not know it was a woman. I was living my life as though I were a man.


My body was apparently confused by the fact that it never got pregnant. Or married. And had a job. And a home. And paid its own mortgage.


My immune system was depressed, my thyroid was probably weak …there were so many things wrong with me it was amazing I was still walking around.

He wrote down a long list of things I needed to buy and in two weeks, if they weren’t helping, we’d tweak the regimen.

In addition to the supplements I needed, my diet needed some changing as well. First on the list to go were coffee and sugar.

I don’t drink, I don’t smoke, I don’t eat meat, fried food, cookies, cakes …now I was supposed to give up coffee?


I could’ve punched someone.


Then we got up and I followed him around as he collected all the stuff from the store I needed to buy. His wife, the cashier, rang it up.


The grand total was just under $700.


I’d lost my peace over the diagnosis, but not my common sense.


I couldn’t pay that kind of money on a bunch of stuff I had no reason to believe would work. But there went my hand, with my check card in it, releasing it to the cashier …



Just moments after I signed the bill I told them I couldn’t do it …void the transaction.


I left the store in a worse panic than when I went in.


Now I had a health problem to deal with and hundreds of dollars floating through cyberspace.

I called the bank to confirm the void went through. It hadn’t. But I could check again in 24 to 48 hours. Fantastic. Something else to worry about for two days.



Each day I called the bank I got another answer. The first was that it could take a day or two to void, the next was that it could be a week. The next was that it could be up to 364 days …



How about you just void it yourself, I offered. You’re the bank. It’s my money.



No, the bank can’t do that. There was nothing they could do about my money in the ether void.



Money in the ether void, fibroids in the nether void …it was becoming a theme.


I had an appointment for a sonohistogram so the doctor could check the orange a little better and decide whether the polyp should be biopsied. The test was in three weeks, so I had 21 days to heal myself.


I meditated every night in healing green light – something I’d learned from my yoga practice. I focused on visualizing my uterus completely healed, the fibroids melting to nothing and flowing out of me.

I knew caffeine was not good for fibroids, so I switched to decaf.

For a person who loves coffee more than most people, it’s like going from eating full fat meals to non-fat, cold turkey. It’s nowhere near the same thing and doesn’t come close to hitting the spot.

Turns out, I hate life without caffeine, so I gave myself a break and changed to half decaf, half regular. This, I could manage.

Everyone Has a Mexican Maintenance Crew

After a few weeks of self-healing work I had a dream one morning that was more like watching a TV show than having a dream. I’d bought a new Honda Civic, a car I once actually had, but I didn’t trust the engine. So, I traded it for a beat-up old station wagon. I doubted my decision – on the face of it, it was ludicrous - but somehow I felt the engine in the old car was more reliable than the one in the new Honda.


Every time I started the old beat up car it worked, confirming my decision, but with that little nagging doubt still lingering in the back of my dreaming mind.

One day I went to a fair. Everyone at the fair had to park on a muddy field. I parked and wondered if the car would start when I got back out, and if I’d be able to drive it out of the mud.

I left the car and watched a performance at the fair. When the performance was over, I hurried back to the car while other people were still around in case I needed help getting it started.

I got to the parking field and all the cars and people were gone. I got in the car, turned the key in the engine. When I really needed it to, the car didn’t start.

I decided I wasn’t going to freak out. I wasn’t even going to try to figure out what to do. I’d rented a house at the fair for the day, so I went in and watched TV. I knew I had to do something by evening, because I would have to get myself home somehow, but for now, all I was going to do was watch mindless, pointless TV, and not attempt to figure anything out.

Then the doorbell rang. It was the maintenance crew for the fair – a group of happy, friendly Mexicans. The head maintenance guy was at the door telling me they’d fixed my car. It was not a serious problem, the engine was great. It was a quick fix. To prove it, he pointed to another guy in the crew driving it around.

I thought, what do you mean you fixed it? The head guy heard my thought and said, of course we fixed it. We saw what happened. It’s our job to fix it. Not yours.

I woke up from my dream and knew I was healed. I knew I was going to be OK. I didn’t have to worry about fixing anything. It was already fixed.



Maybe I could write a self-help book about Mexican maintenance crews …I still have time to be brilliant yet …