Day after surgery

I slept pretty well last night, but was glad that I had swapped sides of the bed with my husband, putting me closer to the bathroom. I was able to get there on my own, but would have had a hard time having to navigate any further-I was very wobbly. Today I've continued to take Oxycodone and will probably keep that up through tomorrow, but hope I can transition to Motrin after that.

The surgery went great, but the big question, still hanging, is the result of the pathology, and that will probably not be known until the beginning of next week. That is the hard part-the waiting, although I feel in my gut that all is well, and my CA125 is very low at 3.6. 

It was a busy day, with numerous deliveries and a couple of visitors and I didn't get to rest or write much, so I'll have to get to the longer entries containing more of the background that led to this experience at a later date. For now, I'll just say that I decided to write this blog because I could not find very much information on the subject of Bilateral Salpingo Oophorectomy, or the removal of both tubes and ovaries, in women who are past menopause and who have family histories of ovarian cancer. That is my situation; my sister is an ovarian cancer survivor of 4 years, and our paternal grandmother died of the disease when I was an infant, before my sister was born. I have had a known ovarian cyst, assumed to be a dermoid, for about 10 years.

Even before my sister's diagnosis this cyst was being monitored biannually. It was tiny, they told me. I had no pain that I could attribute to it. I had the usual menstrual cramps and often felt that I was able to tell when I'd ovulated, but I never had to cancel appointments or stay in bed during my cycles. When my sister was diagnosed during the same time frame that my husband was being treated for lung cancer, I asked my husband's oncologist what he suggested that I do to manage my risk. He referred me to the gynecological oncologist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center (my current employer) and I began to monitor my situation with that doctor, Marta Crispens, at the helm. We agreed that if it ever changed, we'd take the ovaries out. And it never did, up through the pictures taken in August '09. But then in December, I had what seemed like a period. Then again in January. I was surprised, but not alarmed.

I'd already made an appointment with the endocrinologist in the Center for Women's Health at Vanderbilt to discuss my BHRT, the tiny amounts of vaginal estrogen and transdermal progesterone I'd been using, so I brought the bleeding to her attention. She at first thought I might have exited menopause, gone back to being menstrual, and I was kind of excited about that thought-I'd never heard of that happening before, although I had heard of women sometimes having a couple of months of bleeding when they start out on a new hormone suppliment, particularly progesterone. Well, blood tests disproved this theory, and then we did the ultra sound.

more tomorrow.