The Fibroid Diaries - Part 4

 (Written on 18 January 2024)

Just a few days shy of being 3-months post-surgery, and I am not just all healed, but feeling almost entirely normal again. The only residual niggles are the numb area above the incision scar (the scar goes right across my lower abdomen, hip to hip and the numb area is a triangle above that, so not a small area) and the ongoing collection of fluid in the tissue above the scar. The numbness just feels odd. The fluid retention can get a little sore. Neither are big issues in the grand scheme of things.

The purpose of this post, however, is to remind myself in the future what the impact of the surgery has been, as I think it will be all too easy with the passage of time to forget how bad things had become pre-surgery. Indeed, pre-surgery I didn’t really appreciate how bad things had become; I’d probably been growing that mass for more than a decade, with its impact creeping up on me so slowly that I’d forgotten what ‘normal’ was.

The main two issues I had pre-surgery (‘main’ as in affected daily life the most) were having a bladder the size of a thimble (I exaggerate, but that’s how it felt), having something constantly pressing (or, if I was moving, then kicking) against that thimble of a bladder. The worst day I remember was during the World Championship Snooker last year when during one frame (admittedly an unusually long frame), I had to nip to the loo five times. I was always getting up at night, and by last spring it was up to four times a night. Then there was the crushed urethra, meaning when I could wee it was usually a slow trickle and sometimes I couldn’t wee at all. 

Now? Well, it’s quite marvellous! I can wee with gay abandon! And only a normal number of times per day. And I can run without a constant feeling of being kicked in the bladder. I’m sure that with time I will be able to visit the toilet and not think “Isn’t this amazing?!”, but I’m not there yet.

Even more incredibly, and completely unexpectedly, getting up at night is currently the exception rather than the rule.

The difference is such that even Mick exclaimed on Monday when, in Ironbridge, we walked for the best part of 2.5 hours then went for a pot of tea (out of which I got four large cups), then went back to Erica for lunch and a crossword, and at no point did I dive behind at bush nor nip off to the ladies.

Okay, enough enthusing (oversharing?) about having a full-size bladder with an uncrushed urethra. Onto other stuff we’ve been doing…