Benign

I had been sure of it in my gut, and had wheedled the preliminary report information out of the clinic nurse on Friday, but today I got the official call-the final pathology report was in and the results were a wonderful, positive negative. Nothing in the core needle biopsy of the cyst, nothing in the peritoneal washings. The disease that cost my grandmother her life and that terrorized my sister will not take me! Whatever it is that gets me in the end, it will not be Ovarian cancer. The nurse said "it was just a dermoid", but I didn't ask if any endometriosis had been found, or anything else that might have led to the 2 bouts of bleeding I'd had, or the pain I've had in the right groin from time to time. I will ask at my follow up visit on the 24th.

In addition to the good news, I'm feeling WAY better today; the antibiotics have kicked in. I had started to feel kind of achy all over, not quite flu-y, but not well, with pain in the low  back that felt like aggravated kidneys, but today that has subsided and my energy seems much more normal.  My friend G. noticed it while talking on the phone today; she told me that I had been sounding  spacey up through yesterday, but today I sounded different, and I could feel it too-could feel myself finding words and finishing thoughts that had eluded me earlier in the week.

I feel that it's too soon to really be able to attribute any of my symptoms to the lack of ovaries....there are occasional hot flashes, and I've woken up sweaty a couple of times, but that kind of response comes from drugs and healing and infections, so I don't assume that I'm able to tell yet if any of these symptoms, which frankly have not been very difficult to deal with anyway, is a result of my new physical state.

I have fleeting moments of feeling less feminine, like a "fixed" dog, a bitch who will never come into heat. And there sure was a lot of heat in my youth; the sexual fire has been dampened for a few years now anyway, and I will never miss the painful periods. Mostly, when those thoughts arise though, I let go of them without effort. I feel good about this choice, and delighted that the results confirmed my gut feeling about my health.

So I'll keep posting, and will write more about my background, see if I can find a health profile of some sort to help offer some window of insight into my experience just in case it might be of use to someone in the future pondering this kind of surgery; I wish I had been able to find some information like that a couple of weeks ago when I was looking.