Scattered Sundays

Who wants to talk about my awful periods again? No one? Well, buckle up because this post is a doozy.

Things have changed and surgeries are happening. It’s going to be fine. Nobody ovary-act.

If you’re bored you can read my previous post on period drama here. Since that post, things have changed, and sadly not for the better!

It turns out the extra progesterone I was taking really started off a series of events that spanned a few months and ended with me in a gynecologist’s office on Wednesday being told I would need to have my uterus removed.

Let’s back up a little bit with a tiny recap. I’ve had really awful periods my whole menstruating life. Like heavy and painful. A friend of mine read The Menopause Manifesto and said there is a chapter called “Period Mayhem” and it basically describes everything I deal with. I’m an entire chapter!

But it was my normal so I assumed it was normal. I started realizing early last fall that it wasn’t normal and that maybe I should see someone.

All gynecologists I called in September 2021 were booked until November 2022. Yeah, as in I still wouldn’t be seen at this point had I scheduled an appointment LAST fall. I ended up seeing a naturopath who put me on progesterone and that worked for a while. Until it didn’t.

In late March the doctor increased my progesterone dose which was a tipping point for everything that happened next. It was a really crappy three months but in hindsight, I’m glad it happened because it spurred me to further action.

My friends, I have been consistently bleeding since March 27th. It’s been like a 100+ day period with a few pauses here and there. My friends have jokingly been blaming me for single-handily causing the nationwide tampon shortage in the US.

And while it absolutely sucked, I figured it was my body regulating itself off the extra progesterone. But it was taking a very long time so in June I finally went back to the doctor and begged to be put on a low dose of birth control.

Birth control was not my goal but I just wanted to stop bleeding. I was in full-on triage mode. I asked for a three-month supply and then I would reassess.

It had only been three weeks but the pill hadn’t seemed to do much. Again, I figured that it was probably an adjustment period and I would give it another month or so. And then I had a few incidents that I just couldn’t ignore.

Last week I was at the ocean solo for a few days and it was heaven. HEAVEN! I could do whatever I wanted, walk how often I wanted, eat, and read to my heart’s content.

I was rested at night because Troy wasn’t snoring and Bennett wasn’t waking up asking for water even though there is a damn glass of water right next to his damn bed. Just reach your freaking hand out child. Sorry, tangent there.

Even with the most ideal and rested scenario, around Tuesday I started feeling really run down. Like REALLY run down. To the point that I could have laid down and taken a very long nap. I’m not a napper – ever. Like ever. First red flag.

I was also running every other day and each run felt like I had 30-pound ankle weights around each ankle. It felt like I was running through Jell-o.

My mile pace was also 1 minute more than normal and at first, I thought it was the process of getting back into running consistently. But then I compared it to other times I started back up on running and it was still much slower than normal.

After craving a nap for the third day in a row, I called a private practice gynecologist my naturopath recommended. Their first opening was in late September but the receptionist was confident that she would be able to get me in earlier than that via the cancelation list.

And lo and behold, she called a few days later (while the boys and I were on a bike ride) and said there was an opening on Wednesday. I jumped on it like a seagull on a french fry.

I had been told in 2015 that I had fibroids so the assumption was the fibroids were causing a lot of drama. I went into my appointment on Wednesday assuming that I would need a myomectomy, a surgery to remove fibroids. I’m glad I had the idea of surgery happening already in my head.

First off, the gynecologist – I LOVED her. From the moment I met her which was 45 minutes after my appointment time. Annoyed at first, I realized she was running late because she was awesome and taking care of business and lady business.

She had me tell her my story and said to not leave out any detail. When I told her I had basically had a period since March 27th she let out a huge breath and said a few choice four-letter words. At that moment I realized she was probably the best doctor ever.

She said we were going to do an ultrasound right then and there and about 10 seconds into it she said “ah ha, and oh my”. “Oh, my” from a doctor never sounds great. Am I right?!

She showed me part of my uterus on the screen to show me what it was supposed to look like. Then she showed me what the rest of it looked like. My friends, it was like a scene from Total Recall.

I still have the fibroids but I also have a giant mass in my uterus that is essentially full of blood. And guess what? It’s not supposed to be there! That mass is pushing into the muscles of my uterus causing a lot of pain and excess bleeding. It’s like endometriosis but it’s called adenomyosis.

The doctor said I must have incredibly painful periods and be in immense pain most of the time. She also did a cervical biopsy and had them take a vial of blood from my arm. Her assumption was that I was extremely anemic but wanted it confirmed.

She said with the amount of bleeding that was happening and for how long, and how messed up my ute was, she was shocked up that not only was I upright, but that I was a functioning human being.

For reference, in September my ferritin was 11 (the bottom range of normal is considered 12 for females and doctors prefer it in the 40-60 range) and is currently at an 7.

In order to stop the bleeding, she scheduled an ablation for this coming Wednesday. Wednesday is her surgery day and she wouldn’t allow me to delay the procedure past that time. She said she considered it an emergency-level procedure.

My insurance is not considering it emergency-level and is trying to push it to August 17th. So I’m just going to go ahead and assume the person/team rejecting that is full of dudes.

Once the bleeding stops, we’re going on a full-on campaign to boost my hemoglobin to make me healthy enough for a longer surgery to remove my uterus. Right now we’re in triage mode and I have more questions than I have answers.

I do not know if I’ll be losing my ute and ovaries, or just my ute. I do know she was personally offended by how evil my uterus was and actually uttered “I don’t like it. It’s bad”. Ha!

I do know that how much is taken will dictate the recovery time and what post-surgery life looks like. Will I need hormones? Will I go into early menopause? It’s too soon in the journey to have those answers but I will know more once the triage portion of this process has concluded.

As I said, I went into the appointment expecting surgery. This is a bit more than I was expecting but it’s going to be ok. It’s a plan and you know how I freaking love a plan.

The irony about all of this is that it took me needing a nap to realize something was wrong. After 26 years of truly heinous periods. Whatever happens next, I can’t help but think it will be better than what I have considered a baseline of normal.

After sharing this news with friends, my friend Anna said “I can’t believe this is you with low energy” and Cassie said, “we’ll all be exhausted seeing what you do with actual energy”. I can’t wait!

With the gift of hindsight, there were some red flags that I couldn’t see at the time. One, I’m not a huge fan of salads. Like ever. They’re stupid and boring. But starting in April I was craving salad like you wouldn’t believe. I was eating two punchbowls of salad a day. Like my body was trying to get me to load up on iron.

I’ve been blogging for 12 years now and yet the beef category of my recipes archives only has a whopping 7 recipes in there. I’m not big into red meat at all.

And yet I was constantly thinking about burgers and steaks. I eat so little red meat that I have a policy to only consume grass-fed organic stuff from humanely treated cows (I get it from Butcher Box or our local butcher). But I’d see beef that normally I would never eat and think “YES, GIMME”. Again, that was my body yelling for iron.

I have a sweet tooth of epic proportions and if left unchecked I would have zero actual teeth left. Sugar and I are besties. As a result, I restrict myself to a tiny bit of creamer in my coffee Monday through Saturday and then what I call “Sugar Sundays”.

I’ve been doing this for a while now and usually, it’s fine. But in the last two months, I was craving sugar non-stop like you wouldn’t believe. Like I could happily have done key bumps of Pixie Sticks all day long.

When I am exhausted, I crave sugar. Why wasn’t I connecting those threads that better? Probably because I thought my body was in a mode of constantly having my period. Imagine sugary PMS cravings for 100+ days. That’s what my brain has been fighting since March.

Another red flag – no matter how well I was eating, how many steps a day I was getting, or what exercises I was doing I always felt bloated. Again, I was thinking that was because I was constantly in a state of having my period. But now I know it was because my lower body was full of a giant liquid blob!

I think all too often there is a message out there that if you don’t take care of yourself, your body will force your hand at it. And in some cases, that’s true. But I don’t think it is the case in this instance.

I have the privilege to actually do excellent self-care. I’m able to move my body and feed it good food. I have health insurance that allows me to see a chiropractor when I need to and get sports massages when my body is out of whack.

Instead, I think what happened here is that we’re too damn quiet about what is and is not normal when it comes to women’s health. My periods have been awful since I was a teen and I thought it was my normal. And it was but that doesn’t mean it was actually normal.

So yeah, talking about my uterus is not my favorite blog topic, but if talking about it normalizes it a teeny tiny bit, that’s great. Or if your story is like mine, maybe it motivates you to find your own awesome and proactive doc. Onward!

In non-uterus-related news (you’re like “thank goodness”), late last weekend, our solar panels hit a big milestone. We produced half of our kWh needs for the year; this is pretty dang exciting!

Many people (with good intentions) told me “good luck with solar panels in the Pacific Northwest”. I told them to wait and see. And despite the worst spring and summer since 1945, we have still had a pretty decent production year and that’s nothing to sneeze at.

Can we please get away from the idea that if something isn’t 100% successful then it is considered a total failure? That drives me bananas. If the norm is that you have to achieve perfection, we’re all going to miss out on some freaking awesome opportunities. Let’s normalize B- work.

Our solar company told us that 70% of our energy production will happen in May-September. Since production starts slowing down in 6-8 weeks, I’ll be interested to see how close we get to that goal.

And to my previous point about not chasing perfection, let’s say we only produce 80-90% of our energy needs for the year. Is that not better than getting 100% of our power from the grid? I think we both know the answer to that…

In the Garden This Week

It was hot, hot, hot this week! We had six days in a row of temps 90+. If you live in a place where that is normal, you might roll your eyes. But when people, especially old people, are dealing with those temps without AC, it gets dangerous.

While the PNW people were whiny about it, the garden was pretty happy. We got our first flowering sunflower in…forever! I’m usually focused entirely on edible plants, but since I dialed back how many tomatoes I’m growing this year, I threw four sunflower plants into our main planting bed. They seem fun and they’re pretty.

The peas and lettuce were not fans of the heat. I have a shade cover over our lettuce but lettuce can only tolerate so many hot days. Lettuce, I feel yah on that. Samesies.

I ripped out the peas but left the beets and carrots. To my surprise, I found two thriving volunteer cucumber plants under the pea vines. Like fully grown vines with flowers!

Since the peas had been growing up our DIY trellises (our instructions are here), I just trained the cucumbers up the now newly-vacated trellis. I also planted cucumbers in our main garden bed a few weeks ago, so pretty soon it will be pickles for everyone!

After weeks of watching our tomato plants struggle, I can come to accept that this year is the first year I will fail at growing tomatoes. I can’t just blame the weather because I’m seeing other gardeners have thriving tomato plants.

Usually, I can just ignore our tomatoes and they grow like crazy! This year I even watered and fertilized them. Things I’ve never ever felt called to do before. But, I think I have tracked down the issue to two main things.

One: his name is Bennett but we also refer to him as Destruct-o Bot. For months in the late winter and spring when he was driving us absolutely batty, we’d shove him outside and let him play with the hose.

He kept digging up and filling up my main planting bed with water to make “ponds”. In hindsight, he very likely compacted the soil and washed away a butt ton of nutrients.

Second, I filled the top few inches of our tomato bed with woodchips that we got free from Chip Drop last fall. I’ve long used woodchips for mulch but they’ve always been from a garden center and likely weren’t “fresh”.

I think the woodchips are messing with the PH of our soil and preventing the tomatoes from thriving. Next year they should be fine as they’ll mostly be composted. I’ll also keep Bennett away from the dang hose next year.

What I’m reading this week

Damnation Springs – I mentioned this last week but something nerdy that I forgot to mention was that I learned so much about logging. They really did go into detail on how loggers do what they do.

I always knew it was a hard and dangerous job but I never understood how intricate and detailed it is. It was absolutely fascinating from that perspective.

I started and finished Real Easy by Marie Rutkoski. This book was written up in something I read and it sounded intriguing. It’s a thriller set in a strip club (nobody clutch their pearls, those women work HARD) and it was fine.

While it wasn’t the best book I have read this year, it is the only thriller that kept me guessing to the end. And for that, I applaud the author for that.

I then started Mean Baby a memoir by Selma Blair. I haven’t had much reading time this week but I am enjoying it so far. I think it will become a harder read when she gets into details on the diagnosis and treatment of her MS. That hits very close to home given my mom’s history.

I finally updated my Good Reads list and you can see that here.

READER SPOTLIGHT OF THE WEEK

Herschel left this five-star review on our Peach Ice Cream {Pin this recipe} and I love his additions! It brings me so much joy to see people using my recipes as a starting point and then making them their own.

To add a bit of decadency to the recipe I made two addition to the peach puree.
1 tbsp of Cointreau Liquor, 1 tsp of Rose Sweeten Lime Juice. Followed the rest of the recipe as instructed. Turned out great. Had no issues freezing because wasn’t enough alcohol to keep from freezing.

ON SUSTAINABLE COOKS THIS WEEK

Blackberry Simple Syrup – Learn how easy it is to make your own Blackberry Simple Syrup for desserts, cocktails, tea, and other drinks. You’ll love the amazing flavor of blackberry syrup for drinks and more. {Pin this recipe}

Freezing Blackberries – Learn all the tips and tricks for Freezing Blackberries to stock your freezer with this amazing seasonal fruit. Learning how to freeze blackberries is a great way to preserve this delicious summertime crop. {Pin this recipe}

Confessions – everyone’s favorite silly post of the month.