Goodbye To You (Part 1)

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(I don’t normally post about such heavy topics, but this is something I’ve needed to do and also helps me explain how I ended up starting a blog).

Last November marked the beginning of a 12 month period that I never thought I’d get through. The stresses and the anxiety I had to endure were enough to make me want to crawl in a hole and never come out. As a therapist, I know one technique that helps to let go of past struggles is to write a goodbye letter. So the following is the first part of an overview of the past 12 months and a goodbye letter addressed to these struggles.

A year ago this month, I learned that I was pregnant with our 2nd child. Despite the morning sickness that started at 6 weeks on the dot (the same exact time I started morning sickness with my 1st son), I was thrilled to be giving my son a sibling, especially since I am an only child. And even when I started to spot around the same time, I was a bit nervous, but tried to remind myself that I had spotted with my first pregnancy and still had a healthy baby.

I went to my OB for an appointment to find the cause of the spotting and make sure things were progressing well despite it. Even though I was feeling pretty optimistic, there was a glimer of doubt stuck in my mind, which I rationalized as being normal since most pregnant women often worry for no real reason. I laid on the exam table and waited to see my little baby on the ultrasound screen, but instead got bad news from my doctor. It appeared as though the embryo and gestational sac had stopped growing 8 days before and was most likely a blighted ovum (meaning the baby had died in utero). My options were to wait and see if my body would expel the baby on its own or have a D and C. After agonizing over it for a day, we decided to wait and scheduled an appointment for 4 days later to be re-checked. It was at that next appointment that my whole world changed.

When I went back to the doctor, I found out that there was in fact a healthy baby growing, who had apparently been hiding at the last appointment. It wasn’t anything the doctor could explain, but there was no need to – my child was growing and alive. That’s all I needed to know. What came next instantly took me from a place of tears of joy and celebration to a place filled with uncertainty and fear. As she was looking at the baby, she took a look at my ovaries. While looking at the left one, she said “Boy, that doesn’t look right.” My happiness hit a wall and I became instantly worried. Upon further investigation, it appeared as though my ovary had a complex cyst inside of it. It was not the cyst that is commonly seen in a pregnant woman (corpus luteum cyst) or even a simple cyst that would disappear over time on its own. Rather, it was one that had no explanation or diagnosis yet. All the doctor knew was that it didn’t look right and shouldn’t be there and therefore I would need further tests to determine the next course of action. I remember thinking “This can’t be happening. Why is this happening to me?! What if it’s cancer? Will I die?” These are not thoughts I thought I’d be having while pregnant, or ever!

I was referred to an oncologist gynecologist immediately who took an ovarian cancer blood test. My levels came back slightly elevated, but that was normal with a pregnant woman as the elevated hormone levels could cause a false positive. The doctors conferenced with each other and then approached me with the recommended plan: I was to visit my OB two times a month for an ultrasound of my ovary to track it and then have my ovary removed at 16 weeks pregnant. That was the point in my pregnancy where the pregnancy/baby would be well-enough established to handle surgery without my body going into pre-term labor, or at least that was the hope. At this point, I was just shy of 8 weeks pregnant, so I had 2 months to live through even more uncertainty, anxiety, and sadness.

The first thing people asked me when I informed them that I would be having surgery while pregnant was, “They can do that?!” My response was always, “I sure hope so, because that’s what is going to happen!” January 26th, the day of my surgery and the day before my 30th birthday approached quickly and slowly at the same time. I was glad it had arrived but also extremely sad and scared. Here is a picture of me just before I left for the hospital. Can you see the pain on my face? The struggle to try and be optimistic while I was falling apart on the inside?
 
In order to decrease the amount of anesthesia going to the baby, I was put on a small dose of general anesthesia plus an epidural. The surgery was extremely successful and only lasted 15 minutes. The result of the surgery was that my entire left ovary was removed (along with the cyst, which was totally encapsulated inside of it). I was told that although it wasn’t purely malignant, it wasn’t benign either. It was in a gray category – it could have become cancerous over time if left inside of me, but might not have. (The diagnosis is called a borderline/low-malignant ovarian tumor). I did not need any follow up treatment, but would have to be seen every 6 months for the next 5 years or so to watch my right ovary and make sure it was still healthy. As this kind of cyst is rare to begin with, the chances of it happening to the other ovary are slim, but I am still at a higher risk because of it and therefore need to be seen more often by the doctor.

The first question that came out of my mouth when I was in the recovery room was “How is the baby? Did he handle the surgery well?” I was reassured that he was just fine and that his heart rate never dipped below the 130’s. As a mom, even though I was nervous about my own recovery and diagnosis, I needed to know my unborn child was fine. I was supposed to protect him and I felt bad that I had subjected him to this. It’s not as if I could have done anything differently, but this was not how my pregnancy was supposed to go and I was scared for us both.

I spent 5 days in the hospital recovering from surgery due to a bout of dehydration and a bad reaction to the pain medications. The surgery left me with a 4-5 inch vertical incision from my belly button downward. From what I was told, vertical incisions are harder to recover from than horizontal ones. Add the fact that I was still 16 weeks pregnant and my belly was going to continue to stretch, and I knew that the scar would look pretty funky for awhile! I can’t tell you how many times a hospital employee would come in to check on me and ask me where the baby was since I was staying on the mother and baby unit (as they needed to monitor the baby’s heart rate every shift). I wanted to put up a sign after about the 5th time informing people that I was the one freak on the unit who still had the baby INSIDE of her! I was unable to lift my oldest son, who was 20 months at the time, for 6 weeks. That took a huge toll on him since he was going through separation anxiety at the time. I would often cry because he would literally push me away when I would try to cuddle with him.

This was the first major event I had to endure in the last 12 months, but not the only one. And even though I knew the diagnosis and that the baby and I had made it through the surgery fine, I just couldn’t shrug off the stress from the past 2-3 months. My entire first half of the pregnancy was focused on me and whether or not I was going to be okay. After the surgery, I had a really hard time trying to put that behind me and start focusing on the baby. I still had days where I was depressed and anxious, yet there were other days where I was happy and excited. That experience had left me scarred, physically and emotionally, so it was not a surprise when my 2nd major struggle hit 6 months later.

To Be Continued…..