meeting with the surgeon, and my plan

Met with the surgeon the other day, and got the full MRI report. As I had guessed from looking at the pictures, it's not good news on the fibroids.

Here's what was there, 6 fibroids:

7 x 6.4 x 5.9 cm right lateral ventral intramural/submucosal
5 x 6.7 x 4.7 cm left ventral intramural
3.5 x 3.6 x 3.6 cm left fundal intramural/submucosal
1.5 x 1.3 x 1.5 cm ventral fundal intramural
2.6 x 1.1 x 1.3 cm inferior ventral intramural
.8 x .8 x .8 cm subserosal

Ok, so not only is this more fibroids than I was told that I had, the two biggest ones are a lot bigger than I was told. Furthermore, the relative size of the fibroids that I have seems to bear no relation to what I was told either. I am now completely down on ultrasounds and think they are dangerously misleading.

Based on the number and size of the fibroids, the surgeon said that he could not remove them laproscopically. He did however think he could do an abdominal myomectomy. What would happen is that we would do surgery, then I would have to wait 4 months before trying to conceive.

At this point, my husband and I decided to step back and look at the situation. I could sort of deal with the idea of the laproscopic surgery, but going up to the abdominal myomectomy was just too much for me to handle. Esp. when combined with when I do try to get pregnant, they are going to put me on Heparin in addition to all of the other drugs (see last post for more info on that). At what lengths am I willing to go to have the experience of having a baby in my belly? Plus there is no guarantee that the myomectomy would be successful -- in some cases one might not end up with the uterus in good shape, due to too much scar tissue or other issues. Not to mention all the dangers anytime one has major surgery, such as MRSA etc. We talked about it and decided that perhaps we need to look at another alternative, namely working with a gestational surrogate. The idea feels strange to me at some level, but on the other hand am thinking it would be better for the baby to be in a nice uterus without a bunch of scar tissue and without all that Heparin floating around etc.

So, am looking at the surrogate option. Meanwhile, we are going through a round of IVF this coming month in order to freeze some embryos without further delay. And I am going to keep working on fibroid shrinking, because who knows miracles can happen.

This has all been really stressful for me, which is one reason it has taken me a little while to write and update everyone. After a couple (uncharacteristic for me) crying bouts this week, decided to get some assistance. As mentioned previously I had tried the Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT)doing it myself, and found it helpful. However, this week was feeling so overwhelmed did not know where to begin with it. So I went to go see a practioner nearby, who had excellent reviews on Yelp. It was really helpful and made me feel a lot more calm and centered. I'll keep working on doing the EFT on myself but it's good to have a resource I can go to again if I need additional help to get unstuck.

So, I am not giving up, either on having a baby or on shrinking my fibroids. It's always darkest before the dawn, as they say!