no boys allowed in the room!!!!

I don't know if it's complete bullshit that we call the removal (-ectomy) or a uterus (hustera) a hysterectomy. We also call a kidney removal a nephrectomy, stomach removal a gastrectomy, etc. There's lotsa Greek used in medicine instead of the vernacular, which often aids in worldwide standardization of medical terminology.

BUT ANYWAY! Good luck tomorrow! Hope you've saved up The Wire or some other show to watch the shit out of in the coming days.

I thought q was referring to "hysteria", in the old sense of the word

no, "hysteria" is referring to the womb.

Good luck, Q!

I got just under two weeks of dry time before my period started again, so at this rate, I may be eventually cleared to join you (and Sunny) in a state of blissful womblessness.

Although, that doesn't sound too blissful, sunny. I'm sorry. <3

Awww, thanks, Carl. Now that I have a 6 year old who knocks his teeth out and throws himself through windows the tide of my feelings is definitely turning :D

Thanks VG! Sunny, I'm so sorry you had a shitty post-op time. Did you get to keep your ovaries? The plan is that I keep both, which hopefully will help ward off surgically-induced menopausal misery (I've read that the ovaries can be somewhat "sleepy" after the trauma, and some temporary menopausal symptoms may occur). My depression has been well managed on the same med for ages and ages, so my fingers are definitely crossed that uterus yank does not rock the boat on my mental health. I'm fortunate that I never wanted to have kids, so I'm not having to struggle with any loss of fertility issues. I know that is incredibly hard for some women, even those who have had kids and think they were done anyway.

― mom tossed in kimchee (quincie), Wednesday, November 11, 2015 11:21 AM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yes! I did keep my ovaries (side note: one of them is heart shaped lol) and believe me when it comes to period time you feel everything but without the blood or baby making. I don't remember any menopausal symptoms but I was so furious I wasn't really watching for them.

My hysterectomy came about because I developed Adenomyosis (this is where the uterine tissue grows into the muscle of the uterine wall and results in really sharp stabbing pains that never stop) after having a c-section after age 35. All of my anger was directed toward my obgyn because when I was in the hospital to have Henry the original plan was a natural birth but he kept pushing for a c-section because otherwise it would be a 30+ hour labor. After saying no a couple of times we finally said yes and he never warned me this could happen. The c-section at my age is what did it. So I was mad and him and myself for agreeing and sad because no more babbies. I remember being in pre-op before the hysterectomy and it was me and pp. I whispered to him in all serious - "now is our chance run!!" but we didn't. Turns out that of all my obgyn's patients since he started practicing in the early 80s i was only the second case he had ever encountered.

Anyway....thinking of you right now Q. The recovery is easy peasy, physically at least. Just don't exert yourself for a few weeks and you'll be golden.

ps: sorry for not avoiding the H word :)

Got 99 problems but a uterus ain't one!

uter-less!

hope you are feeling ok x

I'm feeling good! Only rough spot was PACU, where I proceed to get sick all over everything, multiple times. They ended up admitting me overnight so I could stay on the IV for pain and nausea meds. Came home in the evening, had a very decent night of sleep, and now I'm comfortable and bored. Haven't needed so much as a Tylenol. Can get up and down myself, even picked stuff up off the ground without too much discomfort.

Surgeon told spouse that "we got a LOT of stuff out" hahaha

glad to hear of your successfully evicted uterus & minimal discomfort!

must feel super great to have "a lot of stuff" out of your body

everybody out of the pool

<3 glad yr doing ok quincie!

Excellent, quincie!

some quality jokes here <3 <3 <3

Yay, Q! So glad it's went swimmingly.

Congrats, Q!

Cheers Q!
Last night I went to a dinner party at which my mr was the only man in attendance and we talked about (among varied other things) the contents of our pubescent diaries and student menstrual blood art (2 of them work at the art school) Not gonna lie, it felt good to be a member of the ruling party for one evening, esp compared with my typical social outings.

Those topics were discussed lightly, I might add, not like in hushed or reverent tones and not with looks of concern on everyone's face

glad you are doing OK q!!

Pretty sure no boys are allowed in here

thought this was worth posting here
http://www.tinhouse.com/blog/41314/on-pandering.html

oh wow. i've read some of his personal writing in the past, and stephen elliott STRONGLY reminded me of someone i dated.

reading this account of him--that pushiness, that entitlement, ugh. so creepy, and disturbingly familiar.

(haven't read past that--need to breathe for a bit)

if you guys want a terrifying body horror/women's health long read, morcellation is a good keyword
http://maisonneuve.org/article/2015/11/10/worth-risk/

MORCELLATION IS A TECHNIQUE for removing large body parts through small incisions. In the past, morcellation was done manually with a scalpel. But now there are special tools for the job called morcellators. They look like dainty power drills, with small, rapidly rotating cylindrical blades tucked inside the tip. Once slipped in through the tiny porthole, the device grasps and then grinds up the parts that need to be extracted, right there inside the abdominal cavity, and sucks the fragments out. Doctors occasionally do this to kidneys, spleens and adrenal glands, but it is in gynecological surgery where morcellation has flourished.

....Morcellators are particularly handy for removing fibroids, those benign growths embedded in the uterine wall, as the growths can be as hard as coconuts and sometimes as large. While an ordinary uterus can usually be slipped out whole through the vagina, a fibroid-studded one often cannot. With the help of morcellators, though, doctors can remove the entire organ through holes the size of quarters.

But there is a drawback to morcellation: because most gynecological surgeons were using the tools without anything around the tissue to contain it, the procedure could leave debris behind. “Small pieces fall into the abdomen,” said Camran Nezhat, a surgeon at Stanford University who helped pioneer minimally invasive and robotic surgery, but who, for exactly this reason, does not approve of open morcellation. To make matters worse, he said, during laparoscopic procedures, the abdomen is inflated with carbon dioxide. “That circulates the cells inside the abdomen,” he explained, making the spread of tissue fragments even more likely. Although doctors do their best to remove the bits left behind—plucking out individual chunks and rinsing the abdominal space thoroughly with a saline solution—there is no way for surgeons to be certain that they have removed every cell

Oh man LL I loved that read, esp the end:

Some ideas:

dd

Let’s punch up.

Let us not make people at the margins into scouts or spies for the mainstream. Let us stop asking people to speak for the entire cacophonic segment of humanity that shares their pigmentation, genitalia, or turn-ons.

Let us spend more time in those uncomfortable moments when our privilege is showing. Let us reflect there, let us linger, rather than recoil into the status quo.

Let us continue to count, and talk, and think about the numbers.

Let us name those things that are nameless, as Solnit describes, the way “mansplaining” or “rape culture” or “sexual harassment” were nameless before feminists named them. Let those names sing.

Let us hear the stories we are telling ourselves about ourselves. Let us remember that we become the stories we tell. An illustration: I was talking with the writer Elissa Schappell about how much we are both anticipating Carrie Brownstein’s new book. I asked Elissa what she made of this new trend of memoirs by badass women: Carrie Brownstein, Kim Gordon, Sally Mann, Amy Poehler. Was this trend the result of Patti Smith winning the National Book Award five years ago? Was the trend indicative of a new wave of feminism? Elissa interrupted me. “You keep using that word,” she said. “Trend. It’s not a trend. We are here now. We’re not going anywhere. We are here now.”

Let us embrace a do-it-yourself canon, wherein we each make our own canon filled with what we love to read, what speaks to us and challenges us and opens us up, wherein we can each determine our artistic lineages for ourselves, with curiosity and vigor, rather than trying to shoehorn ourselves into a canon ready made and gifted us by some white fucks at Oxford.

(I will start us off by spending no more of my living breath apologizing for the fact that no, actually, even though I write about the American West, Cormac McCarthy is not a major influence of mine.)

Let us use our words and our gazes to make the invisible visible. Let us tell the truth.

Let us, each of us, write things that are uncategorizable, rather than something that panders to and condones and codifies those categories.

Let us burn this motherfucking system to the ground and build something better.

Can we share some stuff we've read l8ly that is in this vein, writerly wise

my favorite is carol tyler whose comics compendium LATE BLOOMER just killed me

also one of my kiddos [ok you're not supposed to have favorites but she's a favorite] handed me a copy of without tess and basically forced me to read it and it killed me
like i was yelling and gasping and laughing and crying at almost every page
i'm a loud reader and it made me THE LOUDEST

Wow, LL, that linked piece was such a stomach-gut-punch. I think I need to digest it a little, but I'm just kinda tired of digesting things.

(On many levels, I'm just kind of tired of a lot of things. But male entitlement is really kind of at the head of the list of things I'm tired of.)

Without my little notebook of Things I've Read this year (and since my commute changed, I've not read nearly as much, which saddens me) I'm bad at remembering the things I'm reading. I need a list of things I can read on my iPhone while waiting for delayed trains, TBH.

I am actually reading At Hawthorn Time by Melissa Harrison right now and there was this passage that just absolutely hit me. This character, a retired woman who moved to the country because she wants to be an artist, but she hates it, and she's having a bit of a crisis over what's it all for. And she thought to herself something like "art is the way that we actually know for certain that other people are real."

But it's that growling sense of ... annoyance / injustice / something ... how are you ever supposed to develop the sense that *you* are actually real, if the only art you ever encounter is all of that stuff made by (or for) the Serious White Men?

It feels like... Big Things have been happening in the world.

It's scary.

One wants to (well, really, I should use first person and say "I want to") connect with other people and talk about the Big Things and try to reach understanding and diminish fear. But every single space that is available to me, to talk about, or learn from, with regards to discussing the Big Things is dominated by this guy:

http://captainawkward.com/2015/11/05/786-trouble-dealing-with-male-grad-students-who-take-up-all-the-air/

Or more commonly, about 4 or 5 of This Guy, shouting at one another, and taking up all the air in the room, and no learning happens, and all I do is back out again more quickly than I came in, with this new annoyance compounding the already existent fear, and worry over my own ignorance. And also more detached and alone than before. Which is not a good place to be.

That speech/essay made me think about Exile in Guyville even more than I normally do (which is kind of a lot under my current circumstances)

Thanks for posting that link LL, gave me a lot to think about

fuuuuuuuck that morcellation thing is HORRIFIC. i guess i never thought too much about how a uterus actually exits the body, but the idea of it being... dragged through the vagina just makes me wanna clench my thighs and shiver with terror.

My uterus existed the body via my vagina, but no morcellation. My surgeon doesn't do morcellation--if the uterus can't come out via the vagina (because of its size or some other anatomical factor), he opens up a bikini line incision and lifts it out that way. Morcellation sounds like an insurance company/hospital dream--a way to make what would otherwise be a more resource-intensive surgery a "minimally invasive" surgery. A little roto-rooting, and send that lady home the same day!

Made me think of Tetsuo Iron Man! D:

fuck i guess i just stupidly assumed it was like getting your appendix out.

that reminds me - i think i'm forgo the tubal ligation thing for the forseeable future, since i managed to get my skin under control and the mirena is less of an issue now.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJWbF_SjWZs

I love this.

I have become kind of obsessed with this column:

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/nov/28/online-dating-sex-relationships-stella-grey

This one is super-relatable but a bit of an anti-climax after the soap opera of her last few months.

I mean, I haven't dated in ... but it's kind of reassuring in an awful way to know that one's tedious experiences are in no way exceptional.

i love j coolidge too

happy birthday quincie!

HBQ!

and also a happy birthday to just1n3

hb j & q!

Oh thank you! HB to just1n3, my fellow sag!

I am 42! Firmly Forty. Can no longer get away with thinking of myself as 30-ish.

happy belated just1ne!

Happy Birthday Quincie & just1in3
awesome-lady-birthdays hooray!

thanks, women!

off topic: walgreens fleece-lined tights for lyfe - jenny and la lech were OTM

also: gel manis for lyfe. except i don't think i have strong enough nails to make a habit of it. got my first in vegas and cannot stop looking at my nails. spent 5 mins digging through a full backpack and came out chip-free!

I was talking with a young lady last night who complimented my Feminism is Cool necklace. she told me she really doesn't know much about feminism but thinks she would like it if she did. Now I want to recommend books to her!

I always get at a couple compliments from women when I wear that necklace.

Ugh ugh ugh you know when you are just getting seriously bad vibes from someone - like Gift of Fear "shoulders up around your ears" bad vibes - and you just don't know if no one else is saying so because they just haven't noticed, or they have noticed but they are trying very hard not to engage for fear of setting them off and making things worse?

In most of these situations the correct answer is "stop looking; don't engage; erect a "none of your business" field. I don't know why this one is getting to me. Maybe it's because certain aspects of it remind me really strongly of the situation that happened to me a year ago. Maybe it's guilt because the last time a community I was in harboured a guy that crossed the line from kinda pathetic and a bit creepy to physically dangerous I was literally the last person to know until he assaulted someone in plain sight and I am plagued with guilt over not recognising or believing or doing something (what?) sooner.

Think it's better to put it here, because this is about *my* reaction and I'm owning it than to either confront or to take the passive aggressive option. I'm freaked out a little, for reasons related mostly to me. Is anyone else feeling that, or am I just overreacting because of my own past histories?