“Not again,” I said to myself as I hunched over in pain, clenching my right ovary. A sharp, fire-like pain took over, radiating to my back. I closed my eyes and sighed, making my way to my recliner where a heating pad waited for me.
I turned the heating pad up high, reclined my chair, and closed my eyes. Even though it was on the hottest setting, the pain continued. It wasn’t hot enough. I sat like that for an hour, hoping to get some sort of relief. I got up, popped a couple ibuprofen, made a bowl of soup, and went back to my heating pad.
“Something has to give,” I thought to myself.
Not only did I have constant pelvic pain, but I struggled to walk. When my mom saw me for the first time in nine months she nearly cried.
“You were walking like a penguin,” she recounted later on. “I could tell you were in pain.”
This was my every day routine for a year-and-half. The pain started out suddenly, here and there. I tried to connect it to whatever food I ate, exercises I did, or stress that was going on in my life. Nothing made sense. It was random until it became constant.
I ended up visiting a midwife I had seen in the past. She was concerned I had Polycystic Ovary Syndrome (PCOS). After a transvaginal ultrasound – which hurt worse than anything I’ve ever experienced – my results came back negative. I had no cysts. My ovaries were healthy looking. The midwife referred me to her colleague, an OBGYN, to talk to me about the possibility of having endometriosis, where lining similar to the uterus grows outside of the uterus. It was a disease I had heard of before but didn’t know much about. Let’s be honest: us women hear a lot about different fertility-related diseases but it can be hard to keep them all separate unless we have them or know someone who does.
When I met with the OBGYN, he said his first course of “treatment” for me would be to put me on a high dose of birth control. If all else failed, he wanted to do a laparoscopic diagnostic, a fancy way of saying he’d cut me open to peek inside my pelvis. I was on the birth control for five days before I called and said I was done. I had intense migraines that made me nauseous and sensitive to light and the slightest noise bothered me. But my pain continued. It was now to the point where I couldn’t lay on my left side. I had to put horseback riding on the back burner and kayaking was a no-go. Going to the grocery store for an hour or two was exhausting. I was ready to let him do his exploratory surgery.
I scheduled the diagnostic surgery and when my husband and I went into the pre-op appointment, I had a million questions.
“We’re just going to go in and take pictures,” the OBGYN said.
I had concerns. What if he saw endometriosis? Would he remove it? What if it was on my ovaries? Would my ovaries stay in tact? Would I come out with a hysterectomy?
Throughout the entire pre-op meeting, anxiety flooded me. The OBGYN kept contradicting himself. First he said it was just pictures. Then he said he would remove whatever he thought was necessary. Then he said he would “burn off” whatever needed to come out.
I was uneasy.
My husband and I were still newly weds. We had only been married a year-and-a-half and were on the fence about having kids. My biggest concern was protecting my fertility, about protecting my future family.
I refused to go into surgery with a doctor who couldn’t tell me what he was going to do or explain the reasoning behind it. After going back and forth for a few days, I canceled the appointment.
While doing research, I found out I had one of the country’s leading endometriosis specialists right in my backyard and thankfully, I began undergoing treatment with him. He was fairly certain I had endometriosis, and likely adenomyosis, where the uterine wall grows outward. Anytime a woman with adenomyosis has her period, the cramping is debilitating — literally takes the breath right out of you — and heavy bleeding accompanies it. It was what I thought was “normal.” At least it was my normal.
About nine months into treatment I had excision surgery, where my doctor went in and excised my lesions. My pain levels instantly improved and heating pads became a thing of the past (and I have enough for one in every room of the house and a couple at my parents’ house).
Months after surgery I continued working with my physical therapist to relax my muscles. I learned how to do exercises that strengthened my pelvis without getting it to knot up all over again.
Fourteen months after my excision surgery I went back to my doctor’s office to see if I needed another round of trigger point injections (TPIs). My hip was hurting again. It constantly felt like I had a Charlie horse in my sciatic nerve. No matter what I did, it hurt and I couldn’t find relief. That was when he told me it was time to talk about a hysterectomy.
“Oh,” I said, taking a deep breath. “So not another round of TPIs?”
“I think it’s time for you to start thinking about a hysterectomy. Where are you and your husband at with kids?” he asked. “I know that’s a personal question but this is something we’ve talked about for a while now.”
It was a deeply personal question and one I struggled with every day. I always pictured myself having kids. I never pictured myself not having them. But I was tired. I was tired of being in pain. I was tired of the toll the disease was taking on my marriage. I was tired of juggling what medical bill I’d pay each period. I was just… exhausted.
I ended up leaving that appointment with a date for a hysterectomy. I was definitely numb.
I had many talks – that ended in tears – with my husband and our parents. Everyone was on the same page. Getting me healthy and out of pain was the most important thing. Adoption was, and still is, on the table.
When my doctor performed my hysterectomy, he took a biopsy. My results came back positive. I was in the small 10 percent of his patients who came back definitively with adenomyosis. It was why I had debilitating pain every single month for the last 16 years. My hip hurt again because scar tissue fused my left ovary to my sciatic nerve. My right ovary was fused to my bowel.
I’m five months post-op from my hysterectomy and for the first time in more than two years, I’m actually able to have a “normal” life. I’m able to walk like normal and function without a heating pad. My uterus is no longer trying to kill me, which is a relief in itself.
And while I mourn the loss, the potential for having children, I’m more saddened with what’s taking place in our society. I mourn for the children that are making difficult reproductive-related decisions before they’re even old enough to be considered an adult. Some are making them so early in life that they haven’t even hit their natural stage of puberty.
The Left has continually pushed the notion that children need “gender-affirming” health care. We’ve been told that we must allow kids to decide to transition from their natural sex to the opposite sex, should they be inclined to do so.
Allowing kids to decide to take puberty blockers or undergo a sex change isn’t just wrong but it’s unconscionable. This is one of those topics that shouldn’t be up for debate. If a seven or eight-year-old feels as though they’re in the wrong body and they want to change that, they should be allowed to do that once they’re 18-years-old. But not a day before.
Parents have an obligation to protect their kids from decisions that could have a debilitating impact on their future. Becoming sterile is one of those issues. Taking hormones and having gender reassignment surgeries have major consequences. It creates permanent consequences for a feeling that could be temporary.
The most appalling thing about this entire debate though, is that women like me, who have suffered from a genetic fertility condition, have to fight for insurance companies to pay for things like hysterectomies. We have to convince them that we’ve taken all the right steps to alleviate our pain before going that route. We’re required to sign contracts stating we know we will be sterile. In some states, husbands have to sign off on hysterectomies. We have this issue when women need hysterectomies and they’re in their late 30s and 40s, yet kids deciding on a whim to change their gender is evidently acceptable.
What this does is, once again, put transgender kids above natural born girls and women. It means living with a debilitating condition isn’t considered as serious as gender dysphoria. And future generations will pay the price.
Beth Baumann is a Political Reporter at The Daily Wire. Follow her on Twitter @eb454.
The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.