Why I Had an Elective Hysterectomy - Sue's Story

I chose to have a hysterectomy when I was 40 years old because at that point I realized that I was never going to be able to have children of my own and that was really the only reason why I hadn’t had the hysterectomy up until then.

I had been diagnosed with endometriosis when I was in my 30s and the reason was I always had really, really bad periods, heavy bleeding, extreme cramping, lots of painkillers and two days out of the month I was in bed and it was just completely two down days.

That didn’t account for the other times when I was just feeling like crap and then mid-month I would get pains in my ovaries and I didn’t know what that was about. It was extremely painful also to have intercourse a lot of times and so I told all of this to my doctor and he diagnosed me with endometriosis and I started on the cycle of every two years having laparoscopic surgery to zap the fibromyalgia cells.

And to me, even though they didn’t consider that major surgery, to me it was surgery; it was major surgery. I had to be put under. I had to be in a hospital and I was cut even though it was slight I still had recovering and to me it didn’t make a difference. If that was going to have to happen to me every two years, that was not an option for me.

I was trying to get pregnant in my middle 30s and that never happened and so, I had gone back to my fertility specialist to ask him about what other options. We had never tried fertility drugs. We had tried in-vitro and a couple of other things and he was telling me about fertility drugs. I was 39 years old at this point.

He was telling me about drugs and shots and all of this, and I was thinking about considering it, but he told me how as I got older the risk was higher and it might not work and he said you might even want to talk to our adoption specialist before you leave, and I thought about it and two months later I am made an appointment with him and I forgot to tell him why; he probably thought I was following up on that. That’s when I decided it was time to have a hysterectomy and he agreed with me.

It wasn’t like I was just saying I wanted it because I wanted it. He agreed that if I wasn’t going to be pregnant that I should get a hysterectomy because I had a lot of pain and I had a lot of discomfort.

So I did get a hysterectomy when I was 40, and I went into menopause immediately and it took a while to get to a hormone replacement therapy that worked for me that helped with the hot flashes, and so that’s pretty much what I stayed on for a while.

I have switched up over the years and now that I am 54 I think for the past couple of years this is the time when I would normally be going through menopause and so I am being hit again with a lot of the symptoms; the night sweats and a lot of the things, so I am still pursuing methods to make it a little bit easier. In fact I have another appointment that I have just made before I came here with an M.D. who is also a naturopath up in Sedona and she said that when we were done dealing with some other issues that it was time to talk about this. So I am on to the next place of trying to figure out what would be working best for me.