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So this is my first ever blog post. It feels good to be able to write something down and get it out and off my chest. It's Saturday morning and I am reeling from a bombshell of a Friday. My first day back at work(ing from home) and as I trudge through my >500 emails I find one from a former studnet who is currently being sectioned and is terrified and asking for help. How can I help her? I have no idea, but I want to. I am not in a position to do much - I am currently recovering from major surgery so moving around is tricky. I send an email to some colleagues and hope I can do something for her.
Another email is about a colleague who died while I was away. You can't make this stuff up. I've been away for 2 weeks. She died last Sunday. I did not know her very well, but I did know her, have known her since my PhD days - so for about 15 years on and off. I saw her in the office 2 weeks ago. I feel so shocked and it touches on a place I hold some previous grief. I don't know what to do with my feelings about it so I focus on the absurdity of the situation instead.
The rest of the day was emotional for different reasons. I went to London Bridge, up the Shard to my (private!) consultant's office, with my partner Rob. I hate that I had to go private, I hate that the money I paid for my very necessary operation in part goes towards this guy having an office in the fucking Shard, but I needed my situation to end, and I needed to feel like I had some control over my body and my health for once. So I paid. I haven't told the NHS yet that they can strike me off their waiting list yet. I will do it. Though a big part of me is tempted to see how long they would have taken to get around to me, just to know so I can feel angry and riteous, and good about my decision to pay thousands for this surgery.
This bit is the real bombshell, the reason why I am finally writing this blog. In that post-operative consultation, where we marvel again at the obsurd size of fibroid that the he removed from my uterous muscle, and dicuss how well my healing is going from the two small incisions (one in my belly button - more on that horror later) and one 6cm long cut, low on my abdomen, he let's me know that the parthology is back and no cancer was found. This is good news, though, honestly I never really entertained the possibility that is would be cancerous. This is partly because the risk is minimal (<1 in 1000) and partly because I just refuse to worry about this as well, until I absolutely have to.
Next step is to answer my questions (always have your trusty fertility notebook with your notes and questions - this has been invaluable over the years), which he does fairly bruskly (definite "Why are you asking me such obvious questions?" vibe) and then a return to the indignity of an exam. It's particularly hard this time, I think because I have been through so much, and I just had that operation and 2-day hospital stay where I had to again give up all my autonomy over my body and actions, my dignity, suspend my embarrassment with a bunch of (caring) strangers (aka healthcare professionals) and my family. So I go and lie on the table and the nurse is very nice, and the consultant takes a very quick look at the healing wounds and is happy. Good. I can get dressed and just be a fucking normal adult human being again, who does not show her parts to near strangers and is in control of her body. In hate giving that up. I know it is necessary. I know this is just medicine and I am just a walking talking uterous to this guy who deals with them every day and is so used to it it's not a thing. But I don't want to be weak. I don't want to be broken and needing help and having to show my body to people, even if they are consultants. I want to be the adult woman I am. The STEM academic. The 41 year old who has a job and a house and a husband and a cat and my shit together.
Then, just as we're wrapping up and I chicken out of the more demanding points I have written down, I start to try to ask the question about fertility. The consultant keeps banging on about how I need to not get pregnant for 6 months (Ha!) and because of the op I'll need an early pregnancy scan and must have a caesarean(sp?!) section to deliver. Ha. I almost down bother. It's been six, no seven? eight? years of trying for a baby. One ectopic pregnancy (oh Christmas 2020, what a year). Five unsuccessful rounds of IVF starting summer 2021 (so much to say about that). So much hurt and so much grief, and now I'm bitter and jaded and almost hopeless. But I have it written down, and I know I should ask, and I know my sister will probably check I did, so I should (she is an amazing coach). I start to ask, but I can't get the words into the right order. Every time I try, my barin short circuits as I'm trying to also say I know it's hopeless and of course he wouldn't be willing to go on record with anything definitive anyway, so why am I bothering? But Rob is brilliant, and he picks it up and makes a sensible sentence asking if having this 15 cm removed from my uterus wall could increase our chances of getting pregnant. He responds before Rob can even finish and says "Yes". I am struggling to hear that. To take it in. Because we have been told so so many times that our infertility is unexplained. That the fibroid is nothing to do with it, couldn't effect what's going on. I feel stupid, so so stupid. The consultant then breezes on with "the link between fibroids and unsuccessul IVF is well-known". I am in shock. I don't realy connect to what's he's saying. I can't, I won't let myself take it in, because we are on the 6th floor of the Shard and we have like a two hour journey to get home (and I'm already exhausted because this is the most I've had to hold upself upright in two weeks since the surgery), and I don't know how I'm going to really take this news. That we have paid £20k and been through so much physical and mental pain over the last 5 years and for what? Could this never have worked while the fibroid was there? Did the IVF clinic callously take our money and hope and time without even bothering to check if it would even work?
I have so many feelings about this.
I know Rob does too. This isn't just about me. But right now I have to just feel my feelings and go through and process what this all means. So that's what I'm doing this Saturday morning. This blogging is good. It feels good. I don't care if anyone even reads it, it feels cathartic - the creative and emotional outlet I knew I needed, but didn't know how to get. Plus now I get/have to learn html which I think I might quite enjoy throwing myself into. It's this or watercolours. I think this for now.
So I believe that blog posts are supposed to be somewhat bitesized, and I fear that part 1 was going on a bit, so I thought I'd split it up, but I'm actually just writing this straight away afterwards. Maybe I'll remove the break, but I also don't think I want to write a novel, so I need to think a bit about the structure here. Hmm. I'll come back to this.
Saturday morning starts off with another horribly early start. As in, I start to wake up after 5.5 hrs sleep and can't go back. This is pretty much the norm for me at the moment, for the last few weeks/months, so I just accept it, read some book on my phone, then to the Guardian to try to read some news (though they don't seem to focus so much on that any more..). There is an interview with Melinda French Gates and I am a little intrigued because the strap line mentions Epstein, and I care a lot about women's rights and uncovering their abuse, and the whole Epstein thing is a monumental catastrophic abuse of women and their rights. By super wealthy, entitled, disgusting men who all got away completely scot-free. Thus far. I include Epstein in that because he's dead, so he never had to live with his punishment. A bit crude, I know. The interview is actually quite good, she comes across as an intelligent, serious woman. I don't know lots about her, but when I read that she divorced Gates after 27 years of marriage in part because he was unfaithful, and also because he continued to associate with Epstein despite her objections, I feel for her. That is hard. And hasn't she been proved right? There's a draft email in the Epstein files saying Gates was involved and something pretty grim about him going to slip antibiotics to French Gates because he got an STI from his antics with Epstein. He denies this, obvs. She's a serious, powerful woman, and this is how the men around her were treating her or the very least, speaking about her. Isn't that just so emblematic of the fucked-up patriarchal society we all exist in. Bring women down, because if they're down, we're up.
The interview moves on to her foundation Pivotal, which as an aside, Gates had to donate $12.5bn to as part of the divorce settlement. The foundation was founded to promote women's empowerment and who can't get behind that? She has a new initiative which I guess is the reason she is doing this interview, focussing on women's healthcare, split between women's reporductive health (tick) and health in midlife (soon to be tick). So of course this is extremely relevant to be, so I care. But those two things effect half the population of the planet. So it's self-interest, but also shouldn't we all care about this stuff? There is a line which floors me, just makes me so angry: "Research shows that women experience higher rates of disability and illness than men, but for every dollar spent globally on medical research and innovation, just 5 cents goes to women’s health."
I know that a lot of medical research is on generic health issues which will affect both men and women. I do know that. I know that this is a somewhat misleading statement, because it does't show how much is dedicated to just men's health, etc. etc. But I also know that, the vast vast majority of generic medical research is historially tailored to men's physiology. Men were and largely still are the research subjects - the way that their bodies react to drugs and experience conditions is what we consider the norm for all, when that just isn't correct. Case in point - cardio vascular disease (CVD) kills more women annually than men and has done so since 1984. This is in part due to the fact that women can experience different symptoms to men and so do not recognise they are having a heart attack, and their doctors don't realise it either. This is because pretty much all CVD research has been done on men - up until very very recently. [side note, whilst reading around to find the links for that nugget, I stumbled on this new $55m research programme investigating an 'Invisible’ heart condition disproportionately affecting women - ANOCA (angina with no obstructive coronary arteries), which is being partly funded by Pivotal. Cool.
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