I'm one step and a whole basket full of frustrations closer to being done with this accidental effort to rack up frequent flier miles at the hospital and doctor's office.
My pre-op appointment with my doctor was on Tuesday and I found out upon arrival it would be a "here's your paper thin lap sheet" kind of visit. By now I am embarrassingly good at these. It was also a thorough set of stats kind of day, so naturally I wore boots and socks over tight jeans I had to get into and out of multiple times for accurate height, weight and previously mentioned lap sheet time. For my surgery I'm wearing flip flops, watch me.
The doctor explained in more detail exactly what would happen with the surgical procedure. I would be fully anesthetized and positioned on the table (this surprised me a bit as she explained for my D&C I'd been mildly sedated, corrected to more significantly sedated so they could maintain my airway with an object I surely would have objected to otherwise. I was knocked completely out, is what I'm saying, and I can't fathom how this surgery will feel any different than that one...). They would start by making a very small incision in the lowest part of my belly button to fill me with gas to allow space and room to maneuver. They would then increase the incision size a little bit to fit the laparoscope, **at which point she would be able to determine my uterus shape and be able to decide if she would go to cut back the septum or if there is a significant, over-pronounced heart shape, in which case she would abandon the efforts for septum correction. I would then be dilated to allow one of two devices for the cutting; the scissors are smaller but take a little bit longer to cut, the curly looking thing (pretty close to how she described it) was a little bit bigger but made for a quicker procedure. Since the sepate tissue should be fairly lacking in blood vessels there should be little to no bleeding so no suturing of any variety needed. She would try to release as much of the gas as possible and close my belly button incision with one dissolving suture. The rest of the gas she said I would breath off throughout the rest of the day and I may experience some neck and shoulder pain as a result. I should also expect some abdominal pain or discomfort and cramping and need to avoid strenuous activity for a week and allow about a month for healing, at which point, I am already dreading, we will do a second HSG (because the fist one was so much fun) to confirm the correction.
I told my doctor that I would be going to the hospital right after my appointment as they told me the night before they needed to do an EKG. She was surprised they wanted to do one, given my age and relative health history, but because my height and weight put me in a certain portion of the BMI chart I was automatically required to have one. In addition the hospital said they needed a beta pregnancy test (blood test), despite having been on birth control for a month and my doctor confirming the start of my new cycle. I hedged with her twice that I really hoped to avoid the additional testing but she didn't pick up on it and I had a headache, felt vaguely unwell and didn't have it in me to try
to refuse the tests, if I even knew who else to talk to about trying to argue
my case for not needing one.
I've gotten pretty good at checking in at the hospital and it went fairly quickly. I found my way down the hall to an incredibly nondescript lab door and luckily bumped into a technician right inside who told me what to do with the file folder I'd been given, then sat to wait. A woman came out to ask me if my doctor had done my EKG, to which I blinked in sufficiently baffled manner and finally stuttered that the EKG was the reason I was even there. A few more minutes later she called me back and spent just about 5 minutes with me, 30 seconds of which comprised the actual EKG test, about a minute to hook up the leads, 30 seconds or so to rip them back off, the rest of the time she lamented not knowing when she would be given a day off. I was then ushered to the technician who would draw blood for the completely unnecessary pregnancy test and who, upon being told I was somewhat needle phobic, decided to hit a far more uncomfortable vein location more towards the top of my arm at my elbow, the most bizarre blood draw location I've yet to experience. Kudos, dude.
By the time I was finished with the run around I felt angry, frustrated and defeated. Angry at myself for giving in and just going along with everything rather than taking more of a stand for myself, frustrated at the history of irresponsible, sue-happy idiots who have helped shape the legal insanity we all have to deal with and defeated in the face of the big picture of illogical craziness.
All that said I'm thankful to have health insurance that gives us the chance to have these procedures, without which we might not ever be successful. I'm glad that we've come so far and thrilled that it's almost over (I hope!). My daily prayer is for continued faith that we are in the midst of a plan for us and that years down the road we'll be able to look back on this time and see how we wouldn't have gotten there without going through these challenging steps. One day we'll suddenly see how it was all worth it, in the meantime we'll just keep swimming...
**There is still some question as to which state my uterus is in. All of these terms have been tossed around and used somewhat interchangably, so this is described as best as I understand:
1) Septate uterus - there may be minimal heart shaping (the top wall of the uterus should be fairly straight and look like the base of an upside down triangle, mine may look more like the top of a Valentine heart) and a septum, or wall of useless tissue, chillin' in the middle. This can cause a significant increase of miscarriages as the pregnancy may implant on the septate tissue that does not provide blood or nutrients, which would result in loss of the fetus.
2) Heart-shaped/bicornate - the Valentine heart shaping is very pronounced or there are almost two separate compartments of the uterus. This is actually a slightly better case as even though there is a dip in the wall, all walls available for implanting are sufficiently blood supplied to feed the pregnancy. The downfall to this situation is we will be back to the drawing board for a reason I seem to be having difficulty keeping it.
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