I was invited back to farming this week and thank goodness. Sweat (and hours away from the internet) are good for the soul. I broke more equipment this week but not as badly as last time and so now we’re moving on, okay.
How am I feeling this week? At the beginning of the week I was feeling untethered and tired, but refused the antidotes available (going to bed on time, eating better, turning off the scroll). Farm work (and cycling into new hormones) has helped focus me. So has my impending surgery tomorrow. I’m on a deadline to have a neat house before I’m stuck on the couch for 1-3 days. I’m oddly excited about trying to write about my faith, but my first attempt was very, very messy.
Also, this is unrelated to everything but my house has ants. Boo hiss.
Monday
“Stuck day”, but it’s okay to have those every once in a while, huh?
Tuesday
Dropped off an old phone to get fixed so that I could get some pictures off of it and spent an hour perusing Barnes & Noble
Reading, alternating between The Way of Kings and the Project Management Body of Knowledge, 5th Ed.
Tedded hay (this later got an inch of rain on top of it, but we’re not allowed to dwell on that)
Wednesday
Ran 4x800m repeats.
Picked up the old phone. Disappointed to find that it didn’t have the pictures on it I thought it did, but I still recovered some interesting tidbits.
More reading The Way of Kings
Tried to write out my entire personal history of faith and wow, how complicated we human beings are
Thursday
On Monday, I said I should do “Something Really Neat” so that I didn’t sit around moping about impending anesthesia, but then I got busy and left all my housework for today. So. Not moping, but also not adventuring. I think this is just fine.
Helped load hay. I felt quite strong until I asked L if the bales were lighter and he said yes, they were a bit light. Oh well. I still felt like a boss throwing hay six high.
Prepping to be incapacitated tomorrow: a small grocery run, laundry, general tidying. If I finish tidying etc, I will write some more.
Tomorrow
I’m having a minor surgery tomorrow, and I’m writing about it exactly because it’s the sort of thing people don’t talk about.
It’s called a hysteroscopy, but in lay(wo)man’s terms, the lining of my uterus will be scraped out and a polyp removed. It’s a little bit like a colonoscopy but for the uterus and you don’t have to drink the gut cleaner. They’ll take out any other rogue tissue they find as well.
To get to this point, I brought up to my OB that I had been having spotting and cramping in between periods. I guess it had been happening for a year? Maybe more? Nothing world-ending, but uncomfortable and concerning. I then had an ultrasound where they found a possible polyp. From there, my OB said we could either do a fancier ultrasound, or we could jump straight to a hysteroscopy, which would be needed anyway if the second ultrasound found the same thing. I hemmed and hawed for a few months and now here we are.
I do not have strong opinions in the general abortion conversation. I probably should. I’m probably a coward, one way or another. But one thing that frustrates me to no end is hearing stories of women who could not get the care they needed because it was associated with, but had nothing to do with, abortion. Hysteroscopies are rarely, but still sometimes, in this category. More commonly it’s very similar procedures used to clean up the uterus after birth if tissue — partial placentas, scar tissue, who knows what — gets left behind. That tissue could get infected or could heal improperly, or come loose and cause hemorrhaging.
Anyway. I am fortunate enough to live in a place and have the health insurance that I do not have to worry about it. But if you engage in the abortion discussion (or, really, any politicized discussion), look for the nuance, the exceptions, the complicated humanity. It’s there.
Also, if your body is doing stuff it’s not supposed to do, get ye to your doctor. Okay, PSA complete.
Oh yeah, and I get to be anesthetized for the procedure. As mentioned before, not excited, but trying to be an adult about it. Today I think I figured it out, but I’ll have to let you know if it helps at game time: I keep feeling like I ought to call my parents and tell them I love them (I should do this anyway, I’m overdue), but the fact is that this surgery is less dangerous than the drive to get to it,1 so with that logic I ought to tell my family I love them every time I get on the road.
See ya on the flip side.
I don’t have a study to quote but this is what the doctor told me when I said I was scared before getting my wisdom teeth taken out