Though it’s a somewhat unpolished piece (a rough first draft), enough time has passed where I’ve worked through and have been able to loosely express how my hysterectomy unfolded. I guess when enough energy-sucking time-wasters are sloughed off, and the mind is at peace, the past year’s events come in very clear and ripe for processing. The whole surgery and post-op experience isn’t here, and I’ve not gone as deep as I normally do (still processing, I guess), here’s part of Moira’s Bon Voyage Party, nonetheless…
When surgery day came, I was surprisingly calm—calmer than I was the day before. I was packed, ready to go, and even though I didn’t show it, nervous as hell. My husband (nicknamed ‘the General’) talked my ear off all the way to the hospital, doing his best to distract me.
Sitting in the day surgery waiting room, clinging to my bear Frederick, I heard, “Rebekah Mallory?”
The General and I looked up and toward the entrance to the Operating Room.
“This way. Your pre-op room is ready.”
We walked down the long hallway to Day Surgery. The General was holding my overnight bag and me; I was holding Frederick and Moira—my pink, plush replacement uterus. I wasn’t about to undergo another surgery without the bear, even though I was now forty-three and not an adorably clueless twenty-two-year-old. In the pre-op room I was poked, prepped, and asked one very strange question.
“Um, I’m not really sure how to ask this,” the pre-op nurse began, “but it says here in your chart under birth control…vasectomy? But you’re here for a hysterectomy?”
The General and I laughed.
“He had the vasectomy,” I said, pointing to my husband.
“Oh! I was like, ‘wait a minute, how is that possible?’” she said, laughing.
Lightening the mood was a nice break from anxiously awaiting the two most important people: my savior of a surgeon and the anesthesiologist responsible for keeping me alive.
The Dynamic Duo
They both came in together.
“Well, hello!” my doctor said, smiling behind her mask.
“Hi,” I said, clutching Frederick.
“You ready?” she asked.
I sighed. “I’m here, in a johnny. No, but yes? Are you caffeinated? Wearing your mojo socks?” My doctor had told me before surgery she’d be well caffeinated and wearing her favorite surgery socks.
“I’m wearing my camping mojo socks, I’m good!” She lifted her leg, propped her foot on the bed, and showed me her campfire socks.
After the anesthesiologist looked over my chart, and I confessed to drinking a protein shake with “Indian ginseng” in it that she swore wouldn’t counteract with the anesthesia, we were one step closer to the OR.
After meeting another nurse who gave me an anti-anxiety med, I was wheeled out of my pre-op room. I saw the General for the last time, holding my bag and pink, stuffed uterus, waving goodbye. As he faded from view, I was wheeled down several cold hallways until we arrived in the OR.
I expected to be out of it by the time I arrived in the OR, like I was when I was twenty-two and barely able to see a blob of Carter waving. But I was wide-awake and saw everything.
In the OR, I watched one nurse removing tools from what looked like a dishwasher strainer onto a surgical cart.
“Hi! Feel like you’ve had a glass of wine?” she asked, holding a big, silver tool of some kind.
“Um, no. I’m pretty…alert,” I said, looking around the OR. I saw an empty bed with stirrups, the Da Vinci robot they’d use on me (in me), and three other people. I clung to Frederick.
“Okay, Rebekah, I need you to scoot from the bed you’re on over to this bed,” she said, patting the bed with the stirrups.
Hugging Frederick, I moved myself to the other bed and lay on a sticky, spongy, green mat.
“Heels in the stirrups and scoot all the way down,” she said.
Am I having surgery or a Pap smear?
She walked away, leaving me stuck to a green matted bed, and my anesthesiologist appeared above my head coming at my face with an oxygen mask.
“Hey, Rebekah. I’m going to put this mask on you and I want you to take a few deep breaths, okay?”
I nodded and another woman, the anesthesiologist’s assistant, stood beside me and said, “Now I’m going to…”
Then everything went black.
A Cornish Gamehen
In recovery, the first thing I remembered was feeling an indescribable pain right in my lower abdomen. I looked to my right and saw a shadowy nurse, then heard, “oxycodone, fentanyl” and my first thought was, No! I don’t want that shit in my system!
Then, suddenly, I was sipping water from a straw and eating a cracker while laying on my back. Eyes barely open, the surgeon appeared on my left.
“I love you,” I said to her. Why? I don’t know, but in that moment I did.
She grabbed my blanketed foot and squeezed. “I love you, too!”
“How long did it take you? What time is it?” I asked.
“About an hour and a half. It’s 3:30 p.m. You had a Cornish game hen in there!”
“What?”
“Your uterus was bigger than we thought, 553 grams! Look!” She pulled out a sheet with three photos on it. “There’s your uterus, the big, big fibroid, and some endometriosis I excised.”
I tried to focus on the photos but all I saw were red blobs of tissue and a tiny black spot—the endo.
“Are my ovaries still in there?”
“Yep, they looked good, so I left them.”
“Did you remove it all from my bellybutton or my vagina?” From previous conversations, she’d told me if she saw any suspicious cells or tissue, she’d remove everything from my bellybutton.
“Vagina.”
Phew. That means nothing cancerous or pre-cancerous was found.
“Did anyone call my General?”
“I tried, it went right to voicemail. I left him a message from the OR.”
He must be going out of his mind.
Where’s Peter Griffin?
I was wheeled to a recovery room where a different nurse leveled with me once I was more awake.
“You’re not going anywhere right now. Given the pain you said you were feeling and your level of awareness, we’re going to keep you for a bit. If around 7 or 8 p.m. you’re ready to leave, fine. But right now, we’re keeping you.”
I nodded. I don’t remember when or how but my phone was suddenly in my hand and I was texting the General.
“Hey, baby,” I sent.
“Hey, baby. Ready to be picked up?” he texted.
“Oh, god no. Didn’t you talk to my doctor yet?”
“She didn’t call.”
“She said she did.”
A few minutes later he texted, “Fucking T-Mobile. I had to reboot the phone. I just got her message.”
“They’re keeping me and getting me a bed for the night. When I get the room number, I’ll tell you so you can come up.”
Uncomfortably settled in another bed, in yet another room, I looked to my left and saw a familiar hand on the door. As soon as the General came around the corner with a bouquet of daisies, I started to cry.
“What’s the matter?” he asked, rushing to my side.
“I can’t find Family Guy,” I said, bawling. “I just had it and now it’s gone.”
“I’ll find it,” he said, taking the remote. He found it, sat down beside me, and asked, “How do you feel?”
I started to cry again. “It hurts. Everything hurts.”
What I didn’t understand, and couldn’t articulate, was how someone (me) who worked out like a fiend and could stack armfuls of firewood all day come fall, was in such a weakened state. I was frustrated with myself, the meds, the surgery, the whole damn thing. Not because of some image I was trying to uphold, but because I didn’t know myself this way. I didn’t know who I was; I was scared and all I wanted to do was go home and skip past this part of the healing process.
But no one would let me leave.
So, I spent the rest of the night with Peter Griffin, wondering when I’d be back in my own bed…
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