A 25-year-old woman lost her ovaries, uterus, and even her toes due to an implanted IUD that forced its way into her stomach and then liver, according to Fox News.
Tanai Smith, of Baltimore, said she implanted the IUD after the birth of her daughter in 2014 after learning it would work for up to five years. Upon visiting her gynecologist in October 2017, however, she learned that those “side effects” they talk about in all those IUD commercials might apply in her case.
In a post on her GoFundMe page, Smith described how her gynecologist could not find the IUD and allegedly sent her for two ultrasounds which also showed no signs of the IUD. Later in November, she began experiencing dangerous symptoms.
“One day in the beginning of November I was at work I began to have a sharp pain in the bottom right side of my stomach and the first thing that popped in my head was is this that IUD?” she wrote.
The symptoms worsened and Smith immediately took herself to the emergency room, where an X-ray showed that the IUD had wormed its way into her stomach.
“I went and talked to my OB-GYN, told him everything that was going on and even showed him the X-ray picture that they allowed me to take,” she wrote. “So he said I have to get surgery. So I asked him how would they have to get it out and he told me they would cut me right under my belly button and use a scope.”
After waking up from surgery, Smith learned she had been cut three times because the IUD broke into pieces and traveled to her liver. In her post, she claims that the hospital released her despite some bleeding. She later had to be rushed back overnight.
“I was bleeding internally,” Smith said. “After the surgery my mom was told that when they open [SIC] me up, my ovaries was [SIC] black and that they had to give me a hysterectomy. After the surgery I went into septic shock causing me to be in ICU for a few weeks.”
As Smith’s organs began to fail, doctors placed her on a ventilator.
“At the time, I didn’t know what was going on or what would happen,” Smith wrote in an essay published in Women’s Health. “I was convinced I wouldn’t make it – that I would die.”
“At the end of my third week in the hospital, sensation returned to my hands while my toes began to blacken from necrosis, tissue death due to loss of blood flow,” she continued. “On February 2, almost two months after my first surgery, I was finally discharged with a prognosis that hung over me for months: When I felt ready, I’d need to return for the removal of all toes on my left foot and the tips of my right toes.”
Smith had her toes removed in May and has not been able to return to school or work since. According to her, the IUD had been placed into her too soon after childbirth, causing her healing uterus to push it up. She credits God for her full recovery.
“Sometimes things happen in your life and you don’t know why,” she said. “You question yourself why me or what did I do to deserve this? But what you should be asking is what can I learn from it. I’m finally coming out to tell my story because I feel like I can help someone.”
Had Smith used a method like Natural Family Planning, feminists like former Planned Parenthood CEO Cecile Richards would have looked at her like some hapless refugee of “The Handmaid’s Tale.” For some reason, feminists consider it empowering for women to insert foreign objects into their body explicitly designed to corrupt their body’s natural processes.
The attitude has become borderline self-satirizing at this point. Just take a look at this commercial for Nexplanon, the so-called “birth control that plugs into your arm.” Watch as these “empowered” wonder women stick it to the patriarchy by boasting about putting into their bodies an object that “could be difficult or impossible to remove if the implant is not where it should be.”
For the commercial’s entire 1:30 duration, roughly 30 seconds are dedicated to the actual product while an entire minute goes by as the narrator lists the dozens of horrible “side effects,” which, as Tanai Smith unfortunately learned, are entirely possible.
