My Venturing Heart

After a sleepless night of tossing and turning I find myself sitting on the hospital bed in a daze.  The familiar smell of the crisp, stiff white sheets floods my nostrils and the only thing I feel is numb.  A crew of different nurses and personnel passes in and out of the room asking me how I am doing and the only thing I can respond with is a faint “I’m well, thank you, how are you” completely out of habit rather than politeness.  I have known that I would need this surgery for at least five years and spent seven months preparing for it with a slew of tests, doctor’s visits, and just taking time to breathe as the reality set in.  I remember a tall nurse with pink pants standing at the computer.  She had a kind smile and her hair was tied up in a pretty ponytail.  She was going over all of the documentation and consent forms and asking me when the last time I had eaten.  At a certain point a young man in scrubs comes in and introduces himself as one of the anesthesiologists and starts preparing my hand for the IV, taping the needle down etc.  Then the nurse turns to me and asks, “Did you sign the sterilization form?”  At that point I had signed so many forms over the past couple of months, be it verbal consents of releases of information, to asking my sister to be my health care proxy.  As I was racking my brain trying to remember what the simple word sterilization meant, the only thing that came to mind was pertaining to the cleanliness of the hospital.  Then she said to the assistant as he was about to administer the anti-nausea meds to hold off until confirmation of the form was received.  She then said to the intern that I couldn’t have any meds because I needed to sign it with a clear head, because she will never be able to have children after this. 

Then it hit me.  I was having a hysterectomy.  My uterus was being removed from my body.  I have never had to control so many emotions at one time, as I felt my heart pounding and my eyes welling up with tears and it took all my energy to swallow the scream that formed in my throat.  I, Ellen, at 39 years of age needed to have a hysterectomy and bilateral salpingectomy.  No matter how scientific or fancy it sounds, the truth of the matter was that my complete reproductive system was being torn from me all at once.  In the long run I knew that I would feel better, as my uterus has controlled my life for the past twenty-seven years.  I would finally be pain free, and healed from the endometriosis.  I would have the weight lifted off of my shoulders, of not having to worry about uterine or ovarian cancer that I am cursed with, because of the genetic mutation of Lynch Syndrome.  But in this moment all I felt was dread.  At that moment I truly hated my body.  I have always loved being a woman, and yet my womb, the one thing that defines me as such, was being taken away.  I felt robbed, angry, hurt.  I felt like something was wrong with me, like it was my fault in one way or another, and no one could tell me different.  I would be sterile.  My body betrayed me.  I was being selfish by choosing to live pain and risk free.  I was depriving myself of my femininity.  I was waving farewell to the opportunity of motherhood.  I wanted normalcy and the only way of obtaining this was sacrificing this great gift of giving life.  Sterile is such an ugly word and an inappropriate way of describing what I was really experiencing.   I decided right then that I officially hate that word.  How can a term that describes clean and spotless, make someone feel so filthy, stained and broken?  As I sat there pondering these last thoughts I realized that I had to muster up the strength to find the courage to just breathe, and surrender everything to God because at that moment there was no turning back.