Post-Op Tea Party for the Tummy
We just got back from surgery #6 with the St. Pope Paul VI Institute. This is picture of our Mommy and daughter recovery tea party for my tummy (not on my tummy!) now that we are finally at home recovering. We actually learned about the need for surgery #6 about six months prior to this one just after surgery #5. Can you believe it? I actually ended up having 2 out of town surgeries during COVID-19! Even worse than that, God made sure #6 was performed on this past Holy Thursday. Believe you me, I tried extremely hard to find a reason to not have surgery during Holy Week! This one had to be scheduled in a very tight window of my now very inconsistent cycle, and I anxiously waited after each cycle had passed to see if we needed to move the date. Nope. It was actually performed on Holy Thursday with a Good Friday follow up appointment. All kidding aside, this was one of the most profound Holy Weeks I have ever experienced because of it. Thank you Jesus for helping me stay the course that you have laid down before me despite my fear and trying to derail your precious plan!
The really tough part about tacking on two more surgeries to our journey is that the intent for these ones varied greatly from where we started. In the beginning, our determination to achieve pregnancy was the driving force to accept having surgery with the hope of clearing up any issues we had that might impede our intentions. In January of 2019, we had a very difficult telephone consult with Dr. Hilgers where we finally “threw in the towel” so to speak. I just couldn’t handle how ill I began to feel taking all the hormones and how emotionally draining charting and planning for fertile conception had become for us in our marriage. After all, by this time we had our beautiful adoption miracle with Grace, and we thought that maybe God’s will for us was to just have one child, or that maybe we needed to refocus our efforts on starting the process for another adoption if we were meant to have more. Our conversation ended with him telling us that we had tried everything we possibly could while staying true our morals to grow our family naturally and that he didn’t want us to feel like we didn’t do our very best. No one could explain why this just wasn’t happening as only God knows the plans He has made for us.
Oh the heartbreak of it all! It was one of those defining moments in our journey where I just felt like I had finally just given up. I noticed the hurt begin to creep into my heart and thoughts like “if He really desired me to become pregnant, it would have happened already” and “I feel so incredibly defeated and I don’t know what to do now” started to plague my mind. There may be a point in your journey where you feel that God is asking you to make the ultimate sacrifice of surrendering your idea of what growing a family looks like to you, and here we were…just done trying ourselves. Completely exhausted and defeated, I didn’t want to think about pregnancy, infertility, or medications anymore.
If you move with me a little further to 2020 right when COVID-19 lockdown began in Florida, I started experiencing some really sharp pain in the right side of my abdomen. After feeling letdown by avenues of traditional medicine and ultimately being told to just “deal with it” regarding the continuous pain, we rounded our way back to what we knew and trusted in St. Pope Paul VI Institute. Surgery #5 was an exploratory surgery, and endometriosis was found reeking havoc on my appendix. They ended up taking out my appendix, but now my only remaining tube was blocked, or at least they couldn’t prove it was open due to the timing of this surgery with my cycle. Surgery #6 was offered as an option (a robotic surgery with a more in depth look at the tube), and initially, I wasn’t very sure about whether or not to move forward with this one. Remember, we decided long ago pregnancy wasn’t really what we were going to focus on now just pain relief, so did it even really matter if the tube was blocked?
As it turns out, the pain we thought would go away with surgery #5 never actually did. Surgery #6 became more and more of a necessity to help further investigate it. So here we were, a full year of right sided abdominal pain going in to see what else could be the culprit. Endometriosis was now also discovered in my tube, and it was 100% blocking it. They were able to unblock it with a tubal resection, but I also had some hormone testing done that revealed I am having issues with my hormone levels and thyroid all over again. Ugh…back to medications and charting for me at least for a bit until I am fully healed from the surgery and can re-evaluate what we ultimately feel called to continue doing.
So, where are all the gifts in this one despite the obvious unblocking of the tube? For me, the answer somewhat lies in the meaning and significance of Holy Thursday. Jesus is giving us the Eucharist in the Last Supper, which is His very body, blood, soul, and divinity. He’s doing it to leave Himself for us to choose to accept as a continuous gift as He prepares for His passion, death, and resurrection on the days that follow. As we consume Him, He consumes us, and He becomes alive again in our hearts as a result of this gift. I couldn’t help but think that in offering up myself to Him with infertility and now another surgery, He’s been preparing me and helping me to die to myself all along. If I can get out of the way by surrendering my will to His, this new life achieved in the rise of Easter will be even more capable of bearing fruit.
