Tomorrow, Ms. Wisdom heads in for what will technically be her seventh surgery in the last 26 months.
To recap the last couple year’s worth of posting, my wife has long-suffered from something called “endometriosis”, a condition that causes non-cancerous cysts to form on the exterior of her uterus and Fallopian tubes. These cysts are generally painful and can cause a lot of internal scarring and lead to infertility and whatnot.
A couple years back, she elected to have a hysterectomy to pretty much get rid of the pain. We’d had our kids anyway and didn’t want any others, so it wasn’t even a hard choice. But because she’s still fairly young (46 at the time) and wasn’t really anxious to go into early menopause, she kept her ovaries.
Then she got breast cancer and had a mastectomy, something unrelated to the endometriosis. That’s all chronicled upthread.
After the mastectomy she started to get spontaneous lung collapses, which is further detailed a few hundred posts above. That caused a looong hospital stay and three minor surgeries before finally culminating in a fairly major lung surgery to try and stop the pneumothorax episodes.
Turns out that the lung-collapses were actually related to the endometriosis. With no uterus to bedevil, the tissue that was causing the problems ended up migrating upwards into her chest cavity, forming little cyst/blisters on her right lung which would then pop and collapse her lung. And this material was being produced by her ovaries.
No sweat, the cancer drugs are supposed to be shutting down her ovaries. Her type of breast cancer (one of the more common types) is triggered partially by estrogen, so they give women a suppressant that pretty much shuts that down. Since the anti-cancer drugs should have put Ms. Wisdom into a mild form of menopause, her ovaries should have stopped producing the endometriosis tissue. Problem solved.
No such luck. For whatever reason, Ms. Wisdom was not responsive to the standard “tamoxofen” regimen. Her estrogen output did not drop hardly at all. I told her that this was simply because she is too much of a woman for modern medicine to handle… but this otherwise golden line didn’t even get me a chuckle because I meant that she had more lung-collapses to look forward to, not to mention a heightened risk of cancer.
So we went back the doctors and looked into alternate treatments. There was one other drug combo available: a daily pill and a monthly shot. This was great stuff - the pill’s chemicals cause severe joint-pain, and the shot is so painful that it has to be administered in the abdomen, like rabies shots. Oh, and the cost of the shot is $1700 per month… after insurance has paid 50% of it. We tried that for a couple months and elected not to continue. It wasn’t working anyway; the battle between medicine and my wife’s hormones was never going to be a contest.
The final option is to remove Ms. Wisdom’s ovaries. This will absolutely stop the endometriosis and it will permanently reduce the risk of her cancer coming back. The down-side is menopause hitting her like a brick taped to a bus, but it seems like the least-worst option at this point.
OK, that whole section up above was a story I told you so that I could tell you this next story:
The surgery is - as I mentioned above the previous wall-o-text - tomorrow. For a normal woman this would be a fairly simply laparoscopic procedure where they go in with the waldos, snip-snip, and then send her home. A couple of days of bed-rest with a few more days off of work, and that’s it.
But nothing’s ever that easy with Ms. Wisdom. With the hysterectomy, two C-sections, and the endometriosis causing scarring down there on a near-monthly basis for much of her life, the surgeon says there’s probably a 10% chance he can do this with the waldos. He’ll try, of course, but we’re prepared for him to cut her open old-skool. Like a trout.
If/when that happens we’re looking at a couple weeks of bed-rest followed by another month or two of recovery before she can go back to work.
So anyway - I will update this thread as things develop.