(not me, my dr, or anyone I know)
I ended the first part of my overall story with the scheduling with what was to be an exploratory laparoscopy. Here is a link to the first part: My Story (Part 1)
This is the part of my overall story that I would change if I could. I would change just about every part of it, but at the time I didn't know better, I felt stoned all the time, and I had not yet realized I needed a much more specialized doctor than just a primary physician.
Anyway, I scheduled the laparoscopy and had no idea what to expect. I don't know that I even saw my surgeon before surgery... perhaps briefly as I was signing papers. My first concern was that when the anesthesiologist came to see me, he pretty much didn't speak English. I was left wondering how he got certified to treat patients because a language barrier is not something patients want to worry about. He might be a great doctor, I have no idea, but I was uncomfortable and wasn't sure he had comprehended or acknowledged anything I said. I remember being wheeled into a cold, sterile operating room, and the next thing I knew, I was still in the operating room and was being wheeled back into recovery.
I woke up to the worst pain I thought I could imagine. It was disorienting, I could feel every part of my body and all the cuts and discomfort, I had a tube down my throat, my mouth was dry and all I could manage to get out was "It hurts." I must have muttered that 20 times. I would come to learn that the way I came to out of surgery was not how it is supposed to happen. They told me I had to wake up before being administered with any pain medicine but when I get to my next surgery I will explain how much better it could have been. Remembering waking up from this surgery still must be one of my Top 5 Least Favorite memories. Probably the worst but I don't feel like thinking about it at the moment. It was awful. Painful and confusing and disorienting and awful.
I was able to leave the hospital later that day. The surgery involved three incisions - one in my belly button, and one on the lower right side of my pelvis and one on the lower left side of my pelvis. I think the surgery took a couple of hours. I had agreed for the surgeon to remove any endometriosis he might come across, but nothing was removed. The surgeon wrote that he saw "some" endometriosis, primarily lower left-side and that he didn't want to remove it because he wasn't confident enough in his ability to conduct surgery around the ureter where some of it was located. It also seems like he didn't look around fully because I had a lot of it removed later that he didn't even mention.
So this report, right there, cost me at least a year of my life. Because his report was not all that thorough and because he wrote that he saw "some" endometriosis and didn't know whether another surgery was warranted, I tried other things first. Really, he should have written that it was severe and recommended removal right away. That's what my doctor and I discovered when I would finally have my next surgery.
I have learned now, that good doctors recommend good surgeons and refer you to other good doctors within their network and the bad doctors refer you to bad or mediocre surgeons, as was the one who preformed this first surgery. He could have strongly recommended removal surgery and my doctor would have chosen a completely different path. Instead, because he indicated that it wasn't severe, I spent months trying physical therapy for pelvic floor dysfunction instead of right away dealing with the endometriosis. I learned a lot in that time but ultimately accomplished nothing. I did, however, get to my current doctor, Dr. K after this surgery.
It was obvious that my primary doctor wasn't able to deal with me, nobody seemed to have a direction, and we got good feedback about another doctor who worked in the area where I grew up. The moment I met her I felt supported and confident in her knowledge of her field. She did a thorough intake with my medical history, I never felt rushed or like I had to be finished because my allotted 15 minutes was up, and I finally felt like someone was taking me seriously. Right away she dealt with my pain with meds while at the same time figuring out a course of action. She also put me on 3 times the amount of hormones a person would take for birth control in order to stop the production of any new endometriosis cells while I worked on recovery. Something that she felt my first doctor should have done immediately. I guess birth control can "control" it for some people but definitely slows down or stops the production of new areas of endometriosis so is the natural first step for someone with unresolved pelvic pain.
So because nobody wants unnecessary surgery, I went through physical therapy for a while and while all the medications did help, I was constantly in a haze and felt "doped up." I was taking Tramadol, Neurontin, Vicodin, Oxycontin and hoping the PT would work while slowly realizing it wasn't. Finally we all agreed that surgery seemed like the next step. So the next part of My Story is the surgery to remove the endometriosis.
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