A Cat Named Frankenstein

Chapter IV

The surgeon stood at the foot of my bed. I suppose I had been awake for a while because I was back in my own room and no longer in recovery.

I remember that she looked at me and said: How in the world have you been walking around like this?

I blinked at her. I looked at my husband. Like what?

I had endometriosis. Not a little. Not a lot. A shitload.

The laparoscopy to remove the cysts revealed that my left ovary was attached to my bladder, which in turn was attached to my colon. One giant bundle of twisted tissue stuck together with endometrial adhesions.

Think spiderweb. On steroids, made of superglue.

My right ovary was attached to my abdominal wall.

Both of which left my fallopian tubes twisted up like a leftover ball of kite string.

Additionally (because why would multi-organ adhesions be enough), I had lesions.

Not a little. Not a lot. A shitload.

Think internal blisters. That burst. Bursting causes scar tissue. Adhesions form on scar tissue. Argumentum ad infinitum.

This surgeon had opened me up for a little two-cyst snippage. Instead, she spent three hours delicately disentangling my organs from one another and cauterizing every square centimeter of space she could find to dissolve those spiderwebs and seal off those blisters.

She couldn't understand why I didn't know. I couldn't understand why I didn't know. There had been no pain. No discomfort. No nothing.

I spent three days in the hospital. I could barely stand, I was so sore. Not only from the four incisions but from the massive amounts of scraping and burning that had been done. A side effect of which was a swollen bladder. You will never appreciate your plumbing until you can't take a piss on your own.

I was so swollen from the internal trauma that the nurses had to catheterize me. Not Hey, let's put you on a catheter but a straight cath. Which meant they did it over and over as needed. I topped out at 1000 cc's of urine before the realized that they needed to be doing it more often.

In that span of three days, no one came to visit. None of my friends. None of my coworkers. Not even my in-laws who lived less than a ten minute drive from the hospital.

The communication between me and my husband was starting to break down. The past six months hadn't gone very well, and we now had an encyclopedia worth of knowledge thrown at us.

Neither of us knew how to handle it. He went back to work. I was left at the hospital. Alone.