So, in my last post, I explained my absence quite succinctly with a trip and surgery. Well, the surgery was pretty major; I had a total abdominal hysterectomy with bilateral salpingo oophorectomy. "Say what?"-you say? What it means is, they took out my ovaries, fallopian tubes, uterus & cervix. I've dealt with endometriosis and polycystic ovarian syndrome the past 15 years and I'm done. Every person is different, and needs to make their own life and medical decisions after much thought, and I made this one. I opted to remove my reproductive organs to help curb a majority of my pain and symptoms from those conditions.
I dealt with a lot of pain, bleeding, multiple procedures, a lot of worry and then a lot more worry, not to mention a lot of hormonal ups and down for way too long. I'm really glad that I decided to have this surgery and my recovery has been great, albeit longer than I thought. I thought that I would be back up and almost normal within a week or 2, but when they say 6 weeks for recovery, they mean it! I missed 3 weeks of work, then did half days for a week, then back to normal.
I knew I was going to have this procedure at some point, but I decided to do it this year, at this time because of my running goals. It might sound flippant or crazy to a non-runner, but I really enjoy setting new goals and chasing after them and running has provided me a healthy, low-ish cost way of doing that a rewarding myself with the accomplishment of finishing and getting sweet medals (I'm a swag hag!). So, again, I decided to do it at the beginning of June since I knew recovery would be 6 weeks, and my race schedule as of today is the Disneyland Half over Labor Day weekend (now less than 7.5 weeks away ahhh!!) and then, the full marathon in January at Walt Disney World! I knew I'd need as much time as possible to train, I didn't want to suffer in pain any longer, and if I put it off, I wouldn't be able to do the former, and would have to deal with the latter. So, surgery was scheduled and completed in probably record time on June 5th.
My Dr. was great, the surgery went great, I stayed overnight in the hospital and had some friends and family visit in my drugged-up state, and then I was released the next day. My mother came into town to help out for a few days while my husband went back to work which was really nice. After she left, my husband took great care of me and I've been getting better slowly each day. The major changes: no more of the old pain and surgical menopause. Yep, I'm now a 29 year old-old lady. Haha, seriously though, night sweats, hot flashes, changes in my skin, hair, mood, all of it changed like the flip of a switch. But, I'm working through it and it's totally worth the no pain trade off!
Lastly, when I met with the Dr. pre-op, I told her my racing plans and she said she was proud I had it all planned and that I could start running again after 6 weeks. Well, I saw her this week (It's been 5 weeks) and she was hesitant to release me to begin activity, but after explaining my training plans and pacing, she released me to begin walking this week and start jogging next week!!! I have been really struggling with not being able to run when I want. I didn't feel up to it for the last 4 weeks, but I still missed it a lot. Well, last night I hit the road for the first time since the surgery and it felt great. I could still feel some pulls here and tugs there from the incision sites on my stomach (there are 4, they used the da Vinci robot assisted method for my surgery), but otherwise, no pain!
The only pain I felt was some discomfort from my new shoes! Since I haven't run since May, I decided to try to make the switch to more neutral shoes and after checking my stores, I landed on these babies:
They're the Brooks Pure Connects and I really like them, but I can definitely tell a difference from my old Asics support shoes but I think I'm going to switch completely since I'm starting out at square one with walking and working back up to long distances.
And, last but not least, a teaser for my next post, the Disney Expedition Everest Challenge recap! Here's my post-race photo! Come back soon to see my race recap! Thanks for reading!
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| Expedition Everest Finish ©Brightroom.com |
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