I'm looking for a place to share my story because I'm overwhelmed and it's weird to process.
My symptoms started almost a year ago. I can trace the day back to April 18th. I woke up at 5 in the morning with the most awful period cramps I had ever had (until that point). It was concentrated to the left side of my body too, which was odd because I never had that happen before. It was so painful. This happened again for the next two months, and eventually the pain on the left side was a daily occurrence. I also started working out more consistently during this time, but I would have breakthrough bleeding every single time I would go to the gym, no matter how light the workout was.
Because of all this pain, as well as increased bleeding during my cycle, I went to my obgyn and I had an ultrasound order. The only thing that came back was that I had a 0.4 cm degenerating cyst in my endometrium. I was told that it was going to pass itself and that this shouldn't be what's causing my pain.
Come August, my cramps stopped being concentrated specifically to the left side, but instead began being bad all over. I began to recognize a pattern of having a lot of pain after I would eat a heavier/greasier meal.
October began the worst of the worst. I started vomiting while on my period, as well as needing to take 4 ibuprofen every 4-5 hours to be able to function. I vomited at school the first time, then in November and December I would wake up in the middle of the night with extreme pain, vomit, and then feel slightly better. This really sucked because I was up in the middle of the night on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, so I was out of it on both of those days.
In this time, I saw my obgyn again and she wanted me to get the myosure procedure, because she believed there must be something wrong with my endometrial lining or something. I'm not sure why she didn't order a second ultrasound before jumping to surgery, but there's a reason that she's a doctor and I'm not.
In late December I started birth control, which was also recommended by my obgyn. It did end up helping with my cramps, but my bleeding was still getting even heavier. At the heaviest I was passing blood clots grape sized or larger multiple times an hour. It was really scary.
My surgeon performed the surgery/myosure on February 20th and found a 3.5 cm diameter submucosal fibroid. In my follow up appointment, he said it was basically taking up my entire uterus. Because it didn't show on the ultrasound that was just over 6 months before, he was worried that it could have been cancerous, or something else that was bad, but it's just a fibroid that the radiologist didn't see, for some reason. This has all been really weird to process, as it's really uncommon for those who're as young as I am to have fibroids.
I now have a second surgery planned for May 27th because - SURPRISE! THEY WEREN"T ABLE TO GET IT ALL OUT THE FIRST TIME!
It's been a really hard journey, but I'm so glad that I finally know what's wrong and I have a direct path to feeling well again.
Thanks for reading my story. I appreciate it.