What I’ve Been Up To
Not the most fashionable look I’ve ever worn…
August likely seemed like a quiet month for JGP Styled Me, at least from the perspective of my website and even, to an extent, my Instagram. And while it was intentionally quiet from a business perspective, it was anything but in my personal life. As I mentioned, we saved all of our summer travel for August for whatever reason. We took a trip home to Illinois to visit family and then a vacation to Mexico with friends. Both trips were pretty perfect. Immediately after Mexico, our daughter had two days of orientation at school and we had appointments galore that week for her and me. And then last Monday, she went back to school, my husband and I marked our 13th wedding anniversary and I had surgery. An abrupt end to summer in this house!
My surgery was both typical and not; I had a laparoscopic robotic hysterectomy and a sacrocolpopexy and while I’m sure a hysterectomy isn’t a foreign concept to you, there’s a good chance that you’ve never heard of a sacrocolpopexy. That’s what prompted me to share my experience here, on an otherwise style-focused blog, to raise awareness about this type of surgery but more importantly, to raise awareness about what causes someone to have this type of surgery. Sacrocolpopexy is a surgery that treats pelvic organ prolapse (POP), which happens when your pelvic floor muscles weaken and allow your pelvic organs to slip out of position. Even though this impacts about 50% of women at some point in their lives, it isn’t a familiar topic of conversation. So when it happened to me around the time that I gave birth to our daughter in 2013, I was rattled, for lack of a better way of putting it. Something definitely did not feel right.
The best way I can describe the feeling is like something was hanging out of my body. It was my first time giving birth so I thought that maybe I was just swollen or it was part of the healing process, but it was persistent, and deep down I knew something was amiss. A visit to my ob/gyn confirmed what I was feeling was my uterus; I had a prolapsed uterus which meant that my uterus was no longer sitting where it used to be in my body. I’m happy to say that writing about this a decade after the fact, it feels like a blip in my life, but at the time, it felt like anything but that. I was super emotional and felt like my body was somehow broken and would never be the same again. It was overwhelming.
I had read all the things and taken all the classes and asked what I thought were all of the questions before giving birth but I’d never heard of POP! I never heard of it because no one ever mentioned it in any appointment, and no one ever wrote about it in any of the childbirth books I read. My mom had seven children and between them, my sisters had six children and none of them ever said a word about POP (because none of them ever experienced it). I was educated and of “advanced maternal age” when I had our daughter at 35 years old, and I felt very prepared. But nothing prepared me for POP. I felt like I was on an island because no one I knew had experienced or even heard of what I was experiencing. Amongst all of the emotions I felt, there was plenty of guilt, too, in feeling bad for having this condition that wasn’t life-threatening. I would go from feeling helpless and hopeless to feeling like I needed to suck it up because it wasn’t that bad.
I was fortunate to have a really solid ob/gyn who connected me with a urogynecologist whom I swiftly met with and who normalized POP, even if perhaps to a fault. I was still processing everything along with feeling all the feels as a new mom, and she was very matter-of-fact about my condition—that it was normal and treatable. She recommended that I wear a pessary, which is similar to a diaphragm; it lifts whatever organ is prolapsed and more or less makes it unnoticeable. That initially felt so daunting and I was opposed to the idea, but I quickly changed my mindset and gave in. I just wanted to feel some sense of normalcy again and that was the only way I could see that happening. Getting fitted for a pessary, in hindsight, was not a big deal. And it allowed me to live my life relatively symptom-free for a decade. Like everything, it’s different for everyone, but I was able to exercise comfortably again which was a very big deal for me. And most importantly, I was able to be a mom and do all the things I wanted to do with our daughter comfortably. I share this because some people—myself included, at the time—think you can never do X, Y, or Z ever again because you have POP and that simply isn’t true. Ultimately, the only way to really alleviate POP is surgery but it wasn’t something I was willing to consider in those early days. I did keep it in the back of my mind, though, for later in life.
Fast forward to “later in life.” At some point, I set a completely arbitrary timeline that I would likely opt to have POP repair surgery done when I turned 40. In my mind, our daughter would be a little older and it would be a good time for me as I would, in theory, still be young and healthy. Well, 40 came and went and surgery was nowhere on my radar. I went back and forth a bit in recent years, questioning whether or not wearing a pessary was that bad and if I wanted to deal with all that surgery entails. Still, I knew I didn’t want to wear a pessary for the rest of my life, eventually needing my urogynecologist to remove and clean it for me as I got older. The idea of not having to deal with it anymore became overwhelmingly appealing.
This spring I started conversations with my ob/gyn and urogynecologist about POP repair surgery. I’m fortunate to have doctors whom I really trust and respect; they were patient with all of my questions and explained everything clearly to me. I felt included in the decision-making process surrounding my surgery plan and confident about everything. Ultimately, we decided on a total laparoscopic robotic hysterectomy, which meant my doctor would take my uterus, cervix and tubes but leave my ovaries in place—as well as a sacrocolpopexy to lift my vagina back into place and secure it with mesh (no, not the same mesh that you used to hear about on law commercials in the 80’s!).
My surgery was last Monday and all things considered, it was anticlimactic. I was my doctor’s first surgery of the day so I had to be at the hospital at 5:00 AM, but I was in the car heading home by late afternoon. So far, recovery has been going well. The first full day following surgery was the worst because I was sore seemingly everywhere and bloated, but every day I get a little better. I’m happily sharing my daughter’s 8:30 PM school night bedtime because I get tired more quickly! But I’m just glad it’s over and I’m on the road to recovery. I’m back to work this week slowly and am excited for all that’s coming this season.
