Home, but still fertile

My house is quiet for the first time in years. The boys are at my parents' house and I have the day to myself for some much needed recovery time. My surgery had some complications as I'm sure you guessed by the title of this post. Al and I arrived at the hospital 10 minutes late (he can never get anywhere on time!) and checked in at the registration desk. We were taken upstairs and I had the prevailed of being weighed and peeing in a cup for a pregnancy test. Two good things resulted from this: #1) I lost 3 pounds #2) I wasn't pregnant I bet the lack of eating and drinking for 14 hours and the constant bleeding had something to do with both of those :) Off to the room to get my attractive hospital issue gown and mesh underwear on. Nice. My OR was running behind so my surgery was pushed back until 2:00pm. No big deal....I could force Al to watch Days of our Lives with me while we waited. They finally took me back after a quick kiss from Al and off to dream land I went with general anesthesia and intubation.

I woke up 90 minutes later in recovery. The nurse mentioned something about my incision looking good and asking me if I needed any pain medication. I was still groggy. Incision? Doesn't she me incisions? Nope, I only had one incision about 1" right below my belly button. My surgical notes hadn't arrived in recovery yet so the nurse couldn't tell me why I didn't have the two incisions I was supposed to have or how they could have completed all three operations without both incisions. Great. I knew something went wrong.

They finally got my notes and the nurse read them to me. Tubal ligation unable to be performed due to extensive and severe abdominal/fallopian/uterine/ovarian adhesions (scar tissue). My D&C was completed successfully. The lap also confirmed the diagnosis of adenomyosis. The bad news is I will have to undergo another surgery. I will have a few options, none of which I want to choose from. The first and least invasive will most likely be an 8" incision directly above my current c-section incision in addition to another 1" incision in my belly button. They will then go in and release all of the adhesions and complete the tubal ligation. This surgery will be long due to the extent of my adhesions and I will be in the hospital for 2-3 days. The second option is adding a uterine ablation into the mix to try and fix the adenomyosis. This usually doesn't help with the bleeding and cramping from the adenomyosis though b/c it only cauterizes the internal lining of the uterus. Adenomyosis is basically endometriosis of the uterine muscle. They may choose the third option because of this reason. The third option is using ultrasound guidance to remove the parts of my uterus that have the adenomyosis in chunks in addition to the adhesion removal. The fourth and worst option is a hysterectomy and adhesion removal which I don't even want to think about at this time because this whole situation has me quite upset.

So, to make a long story even longer, I'm home and recovering from surgery. My incision was bleeding all night and I had to change bandages every 2-3 hours. It bled through my hospital gown and two shirts. Vicoden and phenergan were my friends last night and Vicoden continues to help me out today. I'm not looking forward to another surgery, a 4-6 week recovery time, another 8" incision to heal from, and not being able to pick up my boys again. I wish I could rewind time and sign some "what if" or "in case of" consent forms that would have enabled my OB to just go in and do what needed to be done yesterday while I was already under general anesthesia. I guess those "what if" and "in case of" statements have held a prominent place in my mind in the past three years. I'm heading back to the couch with my green tea and my doggie. Thanks for all of the well wishes.