back to the OR

so. dave and i have been having issues getting pregnant. we've been trying now for over 7 months. i miscarried once awhile back, so i've always had this nagging feeling something was wrong with me. ironically dave felt the same way about himself. so i made the appt and found a great repro doc here in chandler.

long story short (and in effort to NOT share way TMI), i've now had 3 very painful imaging procedures. i have pretty substantial scarring from my D&C from my miscarriage. it's called Asherman's Syndrome. the problem is, we don't know how bad the scarring is in my uterus because my cervix is so scarred, they can't pass a scope through it. that's pretty bad. there's a funky shape to my uterus, one of the horns is collapsed down. we now strongly believe that it's due to at least one band of scar tissue pulling it closed.

tomorrow i go in for surgery. i'm scared. there's a few ways this can go. 1) it could be minimal, they could just snip out those bands all the way up and it'll be over. 2) it could be a bit more substantial, they could find tons of scarring in that horn. 3) they could find so much scarring that they can't safely snip them and have to use a separate scope site to insert a camera, and then use light to make sure they don't puncture the wall of the uterus. for 2 & 3 the most likely result will be a balloon inflated in my uterus. the worst case is to go in and have all that snipped only to have the uterus collapse back on itself and heal closed. the balloon will stay in for awhile (depends on how bad the scarring), which means i can't swim. which of course is a bummer considering we have a race in flagstaff next weekend.

in my research, some women haven't even felt the balloon. others have cramped for the duration. he told me cramping is normal and it could be severe enough to warrant narcotics so he's already called in the script for narcotics. that doesn't bode well - i don't really have much cramping monthly so i'm not used to it. i've had a bunch of cramping with these 3 procedures though and it hasn't been fun.

my overall worry with all of this - the endometrial lining can't grow over scar tissue. which means that if a huge portion of my uterus is scarred, that's that much less of a chance a baby has to latch on somewhere. when i brought that point up to my doc today in our pre-op meeting, he sort of brushed it off saying he didn't think this would greatly impact our fertility. although it already has. before now he gave us less than 5% chance of conceiving naturally. so maybe those numbers will change after tomorrow.

update to come after tomorrow! might be a good one - vicodin is one of the GUUUUUUUDDDDD drugs...