My Uterus, Myself.

I haven't smoked in five days. I am quitting. Really trying to. I'm going insane. I'm on hormones. No nicotine, a sweet child (whom I see as a ball of knotted hair and razors for a voice right now) on summer break, estrogen, and bloody bleeding.

Maybe I should go back a week or so.

Or a lifetime or so.

I've had fibroid trouble since puberty. I almsot died after having Jenna via c-section when I had to return for emergency surgery 8 weeks later due to the massive degeneration of my fibroids and hemmoraging. 6 hour surgery. Transfusion. 10 days in the hospital.

So, I'm still a little traumatized seven years later.

The bleeding has been back in full force the last couple of months. This month was so bad I'll spare you the details. The doctor is trying the pill again, along with some other tricks, but the trick is I'm 42, and I cannot, absolutely not, smoke on the pill. My last obgyn wouldn't even try the pill until I had quit for three months. This time, we didn't have that kind of time. So I quit five days ago when I started the hormones.

So, I've abandoned nicotine and started this hormone thing all in five days time. My head is spinning. My house is spinning. I walk around a lot. In a daze. Anything not to smoke. I really do have to quit. For more reasons than this.

I'm heading toward surgery--sooner or later (I'm hoping later)--since I'm getting more anemic from all of this bleeding. I went through hell to keep my uterus, but I'm beginning to accept that maybe it's time. Getting close to time.

But shit. Why am I so tied up with what my reproductive organs mean to me as a woman. I wept at the doctor's yesterday, and the sweet blood-taking lady aske what I was most afraid of. I said, surgery. And besides that, if hysterectomy becomes the ultimate answer, I feel like I will lose my womanhood, my woman-ness, my motherness, my tie to my child, the tug I feel RIGHT there when she's hurting or happy, I feel like I'll lose all of that.

And I know that's silly, but I know I'm hormonal, and I feel like a mess, and that's what it's like sometimes being a woman in your 40s.

sigh.

God, I want a cigarette.