I returned to the physician assistant on my internal medicine team who had been walking me through all of this.
“Could the source of my illness and all of my clinical signs be fibroids?” I asked, feeling defeated.
“Absolutely,” she said. “Next is a hysterectomy. All of the surgeons in the system are excellent.”
With renewed hope, I requested surgery with any gynocologist. Russ literally called the teams of every medical group in the city, within and beyond our insurance network.
I told the physician assistant that at this point I would accept help from any skilled veterinarian. Apparently that is more alarming than funny?
Russ and I joked that if you have a flour sack with a hole, at some point you need to repair the defect or get a new sack of flour. He said “I don’t want a new sack of flour, I want you.” My heart! :)
Dad, ever my hero, talked to a leader at Methodist who was related to a friend of his to try to help expedite the surgery. Thank you Friend. Thank you Leader. Thank you Dad. You saved my life.
Original Gynecologist called and offered to schedule surgery at the end of July. It was the beginning of June.
“Yes please,” I whispered, tearing up.
“It won’t help, and you will have a long, difficult recovery from abdominal surgery in addition to the unrelated underlying condition,” she said firmly.
“Ok,” I answered, “thank you.”
I sat on Mom and Dad’s deck and stared into the (changing) corn field with Dad.
Eventually he said “You have a surgery date. That’s good, right?”
I said “I won’t make it that long Dad….I will bleed out by then.”
Dad shot out of his deck chair, seemingly in a panic. He is the least alarmist person I know. When I came into the kitchen to check on Dad, he asked me to read the email he had drafted. We replaced “death sentence” with more benign language and hit send.
Within days, the team of a different gynecologist had called and scheduled a consult and hysterectomy at his first availability. A back up plan was also put in place in which the doctor who had set all this in motion and his associate would perform surgery before that if it became an emergency.
Thank you Dad. Your actions saved my life. You and Mom, Russ and the kids and my brothers and friends and other family got my through this alive. The people on the medical teams who worked to make things happen are the reason I am still here.
I am forever grateful.
