Butt Stuff🎉🎉🎉

This photo was taken at my last iron infusion before surgery. I was feeling a great deal of pain but also a great deal of hope because it would all be over soon. I would soon have relief from the persistent pain involved with fibroid tumors.

Little did I know the fight ahead to get “back to normal” post op.

My mother went through this surgery as did my grandmother and so many women I have known. As this tribe of women relay their stories I notice that each story is different. Each woman handled the situation uniquely. Some stories, like my mothers, were no big deal, pain free, back to work in just a couple weeks. Other stories are the stuff nightmares are made of. My story is an interesting and unique one as well but we all have one common thread, we are without uterus now. This fact brings so many questions with teeth that bite. What is a woman? Am I still a woman? Does it matter? These questions go on to unravel a woven blanket of identity that bonds femmes of all types weather born with uterus or without. Beyond that more questions with bigger sharper teeth. These questions rattle through my head as I learn to pee and poop all over again.

I know, it sounds funny. You have permission to giggle. I’ve been doing a lot of it lately. Each time gas escapes my cheeks, (top or bottom) I celebrate and laugh and giggle as my body allows. Laughing or crying obviously causes me some pretty intense pain right now but it also heals my spirit, usually the last thing to heal on a journey like this. Farting and burping was always a big embarrassment growing up so I learned to pass wind as silently as possible. I was never a loud farter or burper after puberty hit as it was pretty off putting. And I’ll admit that when my kids were growing up farts and burps made me crazy because that’s how I was programmed, and the beat goes on.

To this day I use a butt muffler (toilet paper rolled up and placed over my butt, to stop the sound from being big. Also, feel free to laugh. It is pretty damn funny) in public bathrooms to avoid the embarrassment of farting loudly.

For those of you out there who have ever had this surgery or given birth you know that you have to learn to pee before leaving the hospital. I wanted to get home so I learned as fast as possible. I peed 3 times before I was allowed to leave the hospital. It’s tricky considering the damage to the vagina while removing the baby or uterus is sometimes extensive and quite painful due to cuts and tears that just naturally happen during delivery of uterus or baby.

Obviously, this was an intense laparoscopic surgery where 4 robot arms were inserted to cut the uterus from the ovaries, around my belly button. I was able to keep my ovaries so that a beautiful thing! This means that my body can still produce much needed hormones. The uterus was removed through my vagina

In my case, my surgeon was delivering fibroid tumors, one by one in order to slowly and gently pull the uterus out. Unfortunately I had a lot of fibroids so the surgeon spent an hour cutting them out individually, from my still intact uterus, stretching my vagina digitally (digitally meaning here, to insert fingers to stretch the opening to pull out the fibroid) to deliver each one, pulling out more uterus tiny bit by bit until another fibroid (fibroids are hard, not maleable)would hold up the process and need to be cut out and delivered individually, digitally and on and on. There were many removed this way. I can’t remember how many (I’ll ask at my one week visit, she told me but I want to be sure I remember correctly) but the surgeon told me it was incredibly exhausting work to remove everything safely but it was a success! She was trying to save me from a C section and save my uterus tattoo from being destroyed by the incision a cesarean section would make. I’ve been through a lot with my uterus so I wanted to keep at least the tattoo of her in tact. Being a female surgeon and OBGYN, she understood the importance. For that I’m thankful. Also… I wanted to avoid a major incision like that if possible. I’m guessing a C section would have been easier on my surgical team (though harder on my body and healing process) so I thank them for making the damage to my body as minimal as possible. Again, I’m impressed!

Ok, back to learning to make…

Learning to pee was scary because everything downtown burned and hurt. I went back to an old postpartum trick that I used with both of my babies. After I delivered my babies obviously there was damage to my vagina so urinating was extremely traumatizing and difficult so I took a bottled water full of warm tapwater and let it run over my vagina before I started to pee. This took away a lot of the burning and pain and the warm water gave a more soothing calming feel to the whole ordeal. Post hysterectomy, that area is supposed to stay pretty dry so I had to be careful of how much water and where but it did work for me. It’s not something the doctor told me to do however this is something I just figured out on my own. The moment the warm water would hit my vagina it would relax my entire body and allow me to urinate more freely. However, my bowels and bladder took some heavy hits during this surgery so they really needed some time to wake back up. Part of staying healthy after a surgery like this is drinking a lot of water. Which I did! Not so much that it was a problem but enough to keep my insides lubricated and hydrated. Eventually, when I got home I replaced a lot of water with kombucha because I need the probiotics to balance my gut so that I didn’t experience extreme diarrhea from the three antibiotics I was taking to stave off infection. this trick has worked beautifully! Obviously I’m taking probiotic supplements as well and eating cottage cheese, fresh fruit, activity a & other sources of probiotics on top of drinking about two bottles of kombucha per day. Somehow this has been a magical mix for me. Again, this is my journey, your health journey may be different so definitely ask your doctor before doing anything at all but, I found the probiotics to be Soothing and calming for my entire body. After my bladder was able to wake up and work again, I had to figure out how do I wipe? I have not pooped yet I had only been peeing for days but again I went back to the bottled water trick and ran some warm water over my vagina after I was done peeing And pat it dry. I would then put the toilet seat down, put down a clean towel and sit on the towel to make sure that all of the moisture was absorbed and then pull my underwear back up and walk around for a little while to get the blood flowing until the pain was too great, then go back to bed and rest until I have to pee again.

This entire time I was so proud of myself that I was able to get my bladder back to a place where I could have one steady stream of urine. For the first few days the pain would stop the stream of urine and I would have to readjust myself breathe deeply and allow the urine stream to start again. It’s quite a fucking process. It sounds like something that’s so easy to do because we take for granted that it’s what our body does every day. However after surgery, your body forgets certain things because it’s sleepy, waking back up, a bit traumatized etc. So once I mastered being able to urinate again, not urinate normally, just urinate again, my guts started rumbling and my body started to prepare for a bowel movement. I did not have a bowel movement for about four days after my surgery. Granted I wasn’t eating hardly anything because I was still working through the trauma of the surgery and trying to figure out how to best communicate with my body in its new state, but I could feel that my body was preparing for this massive undertaking. It sounds so funny to talk about poop this way but, go ahead and laugh with me, a lot of this is funny even though there is trauma attached, these are celebrations. Celebrations that my body can return to normal.

I was absolutely terrified that because of all of the drugs that I was taking for pain and because of the anabiotic‘s that I would have some crazy bowel movement that would be extremely difficult uncomfortable or painful. I was terrified of constipation yet I was terrified of diarrhea so I somehow had to keep my body healthy enough to have a bowel movement that would be soft but not too soft if you know what I’m saying. Diarrhea would be a horrible thing to have happen considering all the surgery and trauma to my vagina, my butt holes closest and most trusted neighbor😂😭😂.

If you live close enough to your neighbor, if your house catches on fire, eventually theirs will too if the winds are strong enough, have I given you enough metaphors already?🤣 anyhow, when it was time, I wasn’t quite sure what to do. I all of a sudden became terrified of going to the bathroom. It gave me a pretty intense panic attack but there was no time to work through that. It was on its way out and it wasn’t waiting for anything. So I went to the bathroom, took some deep breaths, and by the time I inhaled for my third breath, it was already coming out. It was soft, it was not painful, it was a huge relief, but I never thought in my life I would ever be so happy to hear loud farts. There was so much gas from the surgery that was escaping my body, it was quite a production.

Jeremy was waiting outside the bathroom door because I am still very private about bathroom things even though I’m writing this publicly. He stood outside the bathroom door and giggled and laughed as farts came exploding out of my body. We both laughed. We both laughed until we cried Because we both had so much anxiety about that moment. Me having anxiety because I was terrified of potential pain and infection. Him having anxiety because I was having anxiety and he is such a compassionate soul. As soon as he heard me laughing he started laughing but then that was painful because laughing right after a surgery like this is painful. We got each other on a roll and just kept laughing at each other and then I started crying because it was such a relief that I was able to do it and then he started crying because I was crying. We were a mess😂.

I have never farted in front of Jeremy. I’ve never pooped in front of him, I’ve never peed in front of him, I am an incredibly private person about my bathroom habits. I’ve been that way since I was very young so this was a really vulnerable situation. His demeanor can be so gentle sometimes and for that I’m so thankful.

The next time I pooped was in the middle of the night and there was a very loud and long fart released. That very quickly woke up Jeremy from a dead sleep. In a panic, He ran to the bathroom and asked if I’m OK. He asked why I was moaning so loud, he asked if I was in pain? 😂I was giggling and laughing again, even though it was incredibly painful to do so, I couldn’t stop laughing because he thought I was moaning in pain instead of farting. again we both laughed until we cried. It felt so good to accomplish this thing that a little baby can do with ease. I felt like a warrior that I had been able to get my body to do the things that needed to do after the surgery to start to really heal. I’ve also come to embrace the sound of a good long loud fart. Every time it happens I laugh and usually it means I have to take a shit. I guess you can just call me “giggle shits” from now on.

Anyhow, it’s funny how life changes our perspective on things isn’t it? My entire life I have always felt embarrassed and scared to fart or poop or pee in front of anybody and now look at me, I’m doing it like a pro! And I’m laughing about it! Sometimes I’m laughing until I cry about it😂😭😂.

Life humbles us. Humility and vulnerability are a good thing. I’m joyful that I can celebrate the weird little things that I never would’ve celebrated before. Every time I go poop all by myself I feel like I am winning a gold star. I’m now to the point where I understand exactly what to eat and what not to eat to control the flora fauna balance in my gut and make the healthiest poops I can.