A New Life and No Money...

I think I left off last talking about our honeymoon. The cabin was beautiful, the food wonderful, and our first married argument was interesting.:) Ironically, it was about future children. That was one issue where Nathan and I couldn't seem to to come to an agreement. His parents had waited 5 years before starting a family, and that thought was appealing to him as well. Why rush into things that we had our whole lives to do? That was Nathan's reasoning.
I wanted children immediately, because I didn't want to waste any time. My fertility was starting to be questioned by my gynecologist, and I didn't want to take any chances. My periods were still incredibly painful, and I didn't want to complicate issues by waiting to have a baby. Besides, if I waited 5 years who knew how much worse things would get and how many fertility drugs/procedures/surgeries I would have to endure.
Nathan and I finally agreed to just not discuss it for six months and I would go on birth control. Besides, right after our honeymoon I was told I would need a surgery to properly assess my situation. All the ultrasounds hadn't showed anything, but yet I kept coming to the ER for pain meds. My gynecologist decided that exploratory surgery was needed to try and find the problem.
So, 2 months after our wedding, I had my first surgery. If I had known all that lay ahead I would have shriveled in a corner and crawled under the bed and simply stayed there for life. I guess it's a good thing that we can't see into our future. We'd shake in our boots!
We went to Winnipeg,MB to the hospital where my gynecologist did his procedures. It was to be a simple procedure with no more than an hour or so in the operating room. I was afraid and Nathan was a little nervous. We had no idea what to expect as far as what the result would be, favorable or not. My biggest fear was that something would be very wrong and my imagination went everywhere. I had wonderful nurses, both for pre and post surgery. I spoke and laughed with them, and told a senior OR nurse how young she looked. I had this funny idea that if I was nice to them, they would take better care of me. :) It's kind of silly, because i myself was working in health care at the time and I could have known that they would take good care of me, no matter what. But, it was a way to distract myself from the panic that I felt building up way down deep inside. It was hard for Nathan to watch strangers take his new bride away into an OR where he couldn't be present and where he felt so helpless. To some, it might seem like no big deal, but for us as newlyweds it seemed like a pretty big hurdle.
I've always hated needles, and if I had known the hundreds of needles that were to come, I just wouldn't have started at all. For surgery,I needed an IV for my anesthesia and that was a scary thing all by itself. Around 4 that afternoon, I finally woke up from my surgery. The surgeon came almost immediately to speak with us. The doctor told us that they had cut several adhesions and that they had found mild endometriosis. This medical jargon was mostly unfamiliar to us, but the doctor was very good at explaining everything and even showing us pictures of their findings. I was still hopped up on morphine, and didn't remember much by the time I got home.
I started to research endometriosis and what it meant, during the 2 weeks that I spent recovering. Even mild endo didn't sound good, and it certainly explained the awful monthly pain. Apparently, mild endo was enough to affect your fertility and throw your whole cycle off course. The good news was that if caught early enough, it sounded like it could be suppressed by using a mild pill form of birth control. Of course, as soon as I would go off the pill, it was just as likely to return. The longer it would take me to get pregnant, the more of a foothold the disease would get. Since, it was determined that I had endo, it was assumed that it would take me quite a bit longer to become pregnant, making the spread of endo almost inevitable. What a vicious cycle this looked like to me.
It scared me, and I started to wonder what I was being punished for. I couldn't believe it, after all, I was only 20 years old and a newlywed. This was supposed to be the best time of my life. Very quickly, my little inkling that I might struggle to conceive became an ultimate reality. My doctor told us to seriously consider starting a family immediately. Reason being that it seemed that pregnancy often seemed to suppress endometriosis permanently, but if left to continue it could render my uterus unable to sustain a pregnancy after a relatively short number of years.
For those of you that are unfamiliar with this disease I would advise you to research it online. There are countless articles on it, and like I said it's hard to explain. I will sign off for now, as I must confess that writing all this down brings back many memories and feelings that I haven't even thought about for a long time. For the sake of my emotions and the fact that I need to fix dinner without the added ingredient of salty tears probably means that this is enough for today. Thank you for reading.