Читать книгу Beating Endo - Dr Iris Kerin Orbuch - Страница 7

I watched my husband back out of our driveway as our little chestnut-haired boy waved from the back seat of the car. “I’m sorry you are hurting again, Mommy—I’m sorry you have to miss the baseball game,” he said. “We’ll call you when the Dodgers score.”

And just like that . . . the car made its way down the cherry-blossomed street without me, once again.

I kept waving to my son and husband, while desperately clutching the bright red hot water bottle tucked into the waistband of my sweatpants. It was another month and another horrible, terrible, god-awful menstrual period.

I had become so reliant, so sickly dependent, on my almost a dozen heating pads and water bottles, I couldn’t imagine going anywhere without them. They provided temporary relief from my painful cramps but couldn’t soothe my confused head and broken heart. I was sick and tired of hurting. How many more games, practices, ski trips, teacher conferences, birthday parties, weddings, and date nights was I going to miss from this otherworldly pain? Was there no end to this torture?

At forty-seven years old, I was turning into the frog submerged in boiling water. The frog sits and sits as the heat is turned up 5 degrees every day until one day it realizes it’s about to become the soup du jour.

Like the frog, I just kept rising up—raising the ceiling for dealing with my pain until I was absolutely boiling over.

My rock bottom came when I was driving my mom and son around Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles. We’d just finished a cake-decorating class and were reliving every delicious detail. As we laughed and joked about our fondant and icing trays, I suddenly felt a strong jolt in my right side. Holy God! This was debilitatingly painful. Like a fierce electric shock.

I had to pull over, stomach throbbing, because of an INSANE amount of pressure in my right abdomen. Yanking the car over to a side street, I hobbled out and collapsed in the grass of someone’s front yard. It was a small, beige-brick 1970s house. I couldn’t help but look in the window and see a nice family sitting down to a chicken lunch. I was wiggling in their front yard, ten feet away from where they were eating. They stared at me in horror—like I was a crazy person.

I grabbed my stomach. Something was bursting in my right side and I could not breathe. I was so embarrassed but in so much pain. My mom ran over to me, and through a panicky breath said, “Come on, honey. I’m driving you to the emergency room. Cedars is five minutes away.”

When I called my ob-gyn to tell her that I was once again hospitalized for another erupted ovarian cyst, she said, “Susan, have you had enough? Are you done?”

I love you, Maria, for saying that.

Yes. Yes. Yes. I was done, but why was this happening? My ob-gyn had operated on me six years before when another ovarian cyst erupted. She cleaned up my ovary and removed more potential cyst tissue. I thought that was the end of my pain, but it wasn’t.

The last ER visit was my final straw. I sat in my ob-gyn’s office and had a complete meltdown. “What do we do? What’s wrong with me? Why does this keep happening?” I begged for clarity, tears streaming down my face.

My ob-gyn did her best to answer my questions but recommended I talk with an endometriosis specialist. She referred me to Dr. Iris Orbuch. “Dr. Iris is the best person to see about endo,” my doctor said. “This is her practice’s entire focus.”

Little did I know that this conversation would ultimately save my life.

Two weeks later I was sitting in Dr. Orbuch’s Los Angeles office. For the first time in decades, I felt like I was going to be okay.

The first thing I learned from Dr. Orbuch was that endometriosis is incredibly difficult to diagnose. Many women begin to develop symptoms in their teenage years and spend their lifetimes in enormous pain, even risking infertility.

Traditional ob-gyns are trained to deliver babies and give Pap smears, so the mysterious workings of the beast that is endometriosis often fall through the cracks. Simply put, lots of doctors just don’t know about it because it’s so difficult to see.

But Dr. Iris Orbuch promised me that I would get my life back. And she was 100 percent right.

My surgery lasted close to four hours. Mine was a very severe case; endo had spread all over my ovaries, ureters, colon, and fallopian tubes.

Less than six months later, I was absolutely TRANSFORMED. My husband and child hardly recognize me now. I skip around the house, cook a mean lasagna, and have absolutely zero pain. I’m outside kicking soccer balls with my boy, at every one of his basketball games, and I’m the first one to stand up and do the wave at Dodger Stadium. I am free. I am brand-new. I don’t hurt anymore. I’ve donated my dozen heating pads and hot water bottles to the neighborhood yard-sale bin. Finally, I can live my life to the fullest.

Here are some life-altering facts that I learned from Dr. Iris:

Women are told we should be tough and that periods are painful so we should just grin and bear it.

Women are made to feel crazy and are deemed “too difficult” for complaining about period pain.

A period is NOT supposed to knock you out of your life.

1 out of 10 women suffer from endometriosis. That’s approximately 176 million women worldwide.

In the end, I was lucky. I’ve lived the California lifestyle for over thirty years, eating healthy—kale smoothies for breakfast—plus doing an hour of cardio a day, followed by meditation. I’m very aware of the mind-body connection and always sought out a holistic view of health and aging. It’s why I was completely floored when I found out I had an advanced case of endometriosis. How, after all those gluten-free muffins and uphill sprints, could I still get this outrageously painful disease? What’s the point of attending to my health if I’m just going to end up on a cold operating table?

The answer is that all that good nutrition, regular exercise, and daily meditation—all that healthy living—got me up off the operating table faster. My body was primed when I went into surgery—primed to take the hit and bounce back. Four evenings after my radical hysterectomy, I was sitting at my favorite restaurant in Malibu eating California rolls. I was truly astonished at how much better I felt. No more pain. My lifestyle made it possible.

I would tell someone suffering from endometriosis to make changes NOW to support your mental and physical health. Go to physical therapy, visualize how you want to feel before and after surgery, meditate, eat colorful, life-affirming foods. Cast a large net to boost and support optimum health before and after surgery. Life is just too short to suffer from this crippling disease.