I've got 4 new belly buttons, yay!

As promised, here’s the tale of my latest hospital visit:

October 04, 2023

I don’t have much experience with hospitals. I try to stay out of them because I’m terrified of them. That was the main reason I had home births. Even going to a “normal” doctor isn’t a thing I consider normal for myself. I have to feel like complete shit before I visit a doctor. Like…having pneumonia or breaking an arm qualifies. Or finding a big lump in my lower abdomen. That qualifies, too. Said lump appeared 4 or 5 years ago when we still lived in Germany. The German doctors wanted to take it out immediately because it would only grow bigger. “It” was a 10cm leiomyoma - a benign tumour many women past the age of 45 or so get as a rather unentertaining uterus attachment.

But I said, “Let’s keep an eye on it and collect more data! See if it gets bigger!” I’m a scientist after all.

It didn’t get bigger. At least not until we moved to Gotland when it suddenly started growing so much that I had to run to the toilet every half hour or so. Very annoying, that.

The Swedish doctors had a slightly different approach compared to the Germans. They put me on hormones to artificially induce menopause in an attempt to shrink the bugger.

Artificially menopaused, I turned into an extremely grumpy and brain-foggy version of myself. I had zero control over my mood swings. Fuck, I hated everything. And I couldn’t THINK. For someone who has fun rushing along the mental racetrack, this brain fog threw me into a depression.

So we kept measuring the bugger every 6 months or so and it stopped growing for a little bit. But the hormones did other things, too. I started getting chronic tendon pain. Kinda sucks even if I were not a full-time farmer without machinery who has to drag all the feed, water, and firewood around with only 2 hands and a wheelbarrow. Uh, did I mention hand-milking the goats?

We changed hormones. The tendon pain disappeared, mostly, but I still have only half the range of motion in my left shoulder.

The gynaecologists and I finally reached the point where we agreed to declare war on the bugger and go at it with knives and forceps. But…the next available surgery date was smack in the middle of kidding season. I’m the only goat midwife in the family and the only one who knows anything about emergency medical care. The vet lives 40 minutes away. The risk for our animals was too great. I couldn’t leave the farm. Not yet.

And lucky I didn’t. Because the first doe to kid needed emergency euthanasia with immediate c-section to save her baby. That was one of the saddest days this year.

To get me through summer (when the farm is the busiest; no way I could be sick for even a day) we changed hormone treatment again. My grumpiness and brain fog got a little bit better. But the bugger grew bigger, fast.

And it got company.

I don’t even know for how long I felt and looked 7 months pregnant with a pile of rocks. I got used to constantly having to pee. I got used to the pain. Lower back pain, hip pain, lower abdomen pain, chronic diarrhoea, shortness of breath, no appetite - that was my new normal. I didn’t eat much. Couldn’t. I should have been losing weight, but I was gaining it. Most of it was water in my legs because the buggers were pressing on blood vessels and organs.

I got my surgery scheduled two weeks after our milking season was over. To say I was nervous would be an understatement. The last time I was in a hospital (short stints to the ER not counting) was in East Germany ages ago. I must have been 11 or 12 years old and had my appendix removed in a shitty hospital at the communistic butt-end of the world. A male nurse put me in a private room and shaved my privates from belly button to butt cheeks “in preparation for surgery.” I’ll never forget the pervert’s grin. During surgery, I woke up because someone forgot to stick the needle with the drugs deep enough into my arm. I don’t know if they cut me open with a scalpel or a spoon, but the abdominal incision hurt for more than a year afterwards. Maybe all of that was normal three decades ago. What do I know?

So imagine the culture shock when I walked into the hospital this October: I had a room all to myself, although you could have fit in 4 beds. Lovely view of the Baltic Sea. The staff of the gynaecology unit was all women. No one seemed stressed. Everyone was super kind. Nope, I’m not expensively, privately super-health-insured. Just the normal health insurance everyone else here in Sweden gets. They invoice 300 SEK for the whole thing. That’s US$27 for surgery, a one-and-a-half day hospital stay in a private room with a sea view, and aftercare.

When they wheeled me into the operating theatre I got another culture shock. That thing was ultra-modern. You couldn’t compare it to the East German Standup Comedy Hospital when I was a kid. Three surgeons, a nurse, and an anesthesiologist dressed up as blue clouds for the occasion. The anesthesiologist was so cool. Why? Because she was NICE and she was THERE (take that, East German Standup Comedy Hospital!) and she gave me the BEST drugs.

Did I mention the drugs? I have to tell you about the drugs. When I woke up, I felt FANTASTIC and had this incredible flood of creative ideas. One after another after another. They didn’t stop. Just kept coming for three, four hours. And I had nothing to write them down. Fuck! But at least I remember ONE idea. So not all is lost.

In the wake-up room, they told me the surgery took nearly six hours. They’d originally planned for one hour. But the size and position of the leiomyoma complicated the procedure, and they didn’t want to make a big cut after all. They took the time to carefully and slowly peel all the tumour tissue away using laparoscopy. I’ll always be grateful for that. The recovery time after laparoscopy is about half that of an open surgery. I don’t know anyone else who would have taken the extra time - bloody hell, nearly five hours more than planned - to make this a lot easier on the patient. Holy shit!

My poor husband was terrified though, because no one had expected the surgery to take so long.

This is what I sent my family as soon as the nurse handed me my phone:

One thing I absolutely can’t recommend is getting a cold shortly after surgery. It sucks. I kept wondering at which point my guts would come shooting out through my new belly buttons.

Yep, I’ve got 4 new belly buttons.

And I spent way too much time in bed. This is the amount of writing I got done in the past 2 weeks:

So I’m gonna sit my ass down now and do the writerly thing. The next couple of chapters might be a little late, tho.

Until next time,

I've got 4 new belly buttons, yay!

Subscribe to keep reading

Reply

Keep Reading