Fear for your health

I write on various subject matters but I hardly ever feel brave enough to write about the true fear in my life – the fear for my health!

As a child I hardly ever got sick. I spent my carefree childhood mostly outdoors, in a beautiful mountain town of Southern Bulgaria. It was a magical place where the air smelled of fresh pines and roses, the sun illuminated all around us for the bigger part of the year and our houses slept under a white blanket of snow during winter. We ate fruit fresh from the trees, swam in the river, cycled and ran around the friendly town and rarely got bogged down with colds, viruses and sickness. At the age of ten I joined a sports school and began training professionally to be a rhythmic gymnast. My little body soon turned rock solid and extra flexible and I felt I was bursting with energy and health. Ever since then, up until my late 20s, I remained sporty, felt healthy and never worried about my physical wellbeing. If anything ever troubled me, it would most often be to do with my mind, but never my body. My body was my rock!

Then it all changed overnight on 29^th September 2009 when I suddenly and unexpectedly collapsed in my new husband’s arms, due to an internal bleeding/haemorrhaging, resulting from ovarian cyst rupture. I was rushed into Brighton’s Sussex hospital A&E, where after several misdiagnoses and a long 24hrs wait, I was finally admitted to surgery and underwent a 6 hour complicated procedure, where a large team of surgeons fought to save my life, after I had lost a major proportion of my blood. The so called laparotomy procedure, left its nasty mark on my body and a long 6 month recovery followed. However doctors reassured me what happened to me was extremely rare and will never happen again. Corpus luteal cyst ruptures are extremely rare, I was told. They should never really cause such a major haemorrhaging and a tremendous mess to one’s internal organs, I was encouraged. Hence there was no treatment for this!

So I went on looking positively into the future and being thankful to the specialists for saving my life and to my body for soldiering through the long hours of anesthetic, surgical procedure and recovery. After all, what was there to be worried about since I was assured all will be fine in the future!?!

So I was blessed with a lovely baby boy in 2011 and was enjoying the wonders of motherhood, when one day, in October 2012, I was rushed into the emergency room (this time in Croydon University Hospital of London) with the familiar alarming symptoms. The puzzled team of doctors looked into my medical history and almost refused to believe this was happening again. Sadly it was indeed happening again. Another cyst had ruptured and another 6 hour major procedure across my stomach followed. This time, all I worried about was what would my 11 month old baby do without my breast milk, while my husband, sister and my parents struggled to make sense of this reoccurring incident. Poor people – they must have felt terrified seeing my like this again!

Needless to say, my surgeries left me scarred for life both mentally and physically. I have had to undergo further surgical procedures due to scarring and hernias resulting from initial laparotomy and I have been living in fear ever since. However, so far, no medical specialist has come up with a reassuring solution for me. There is no cure for something that is not classed as an illness, yet again it can quite clearly happen again.

In the midst of it all, I have been blessed with two beautiful children, for whom I am immensely thankful to my body. I now live in the hope that I can preserve my health for them – for my beloved boys! So I can be by their side, to nurture them and watch them grow into gentlemen. But the uncertainty around the behavior of my ovaries is truly unsettling for me and all my loved ones. I live in a permanent state of fear and every little abdominal painful sensation throws me into panic. I spend some nights sitting in my bed waiting to see if I will feel dizzy, I stand up to check if I feel lightheaded in case I am bleeding internally. I spend my life researching medical journals and sources of information on corpus luteal cyst ruptures and all I find is comments by specialists with over 30 years of experience quoting how rare such ruptures are. I monitor my body’s behaviour and have learned its language, which now helps my state of mind, but there is still so much happening that seems unusual and alarming. Moving onto another age bracket comes with its own physical changes but instead of me embracing these, I often get overwhelmed with worry as I am never sure what is the root /the underlining cause for these bodily changes.

I have lately taken up yoga. I immerse myself in women’s wellbeing literature, natural and holistic approaches to health, as well as trying out plenty of herbal remedies known to balance female hormones with a positive effect on the reproductive system. However, during every routine abdominal scan we see yet another cyst staring at me from the stenographer’s monitor. So we wait. We wait and see if it will burst and bleed or it will peacefully dissolve. And while I lead my super healthy lifestyle, I continue to live in permanent fear. Somewhere deep inside my soul I carry the feeling of being ‘faulty’. Like something isn’t quite right in there but no one seems to know how to fix it. Then I hear of my darling friends (you know who you are, girls) who have battled with cancers and soldiered through some truly dreadful times with so much bravery and positivity, and I feel ashamed of myself. Ashamed for not being able to compose myself and eliminate my conscious fear of ending up in the surgical theatre once again, perhaps not making it this time, leaving my boys without their loving mama…

So I look for light and peace every day. I try to stay positive. I try to remain calm. I try to love my body and even my misbehaving ovaries. I try hard, believe me! But I tell you, it is a tough game I am playing these past 8 years. So when you see me smile at you from those cheerful Facebook pictures, don’t imagine life is only full of joy. We all have our terrifying secrets, the ones we never like to share. But today I am sharing my story because I think it might help another sufferer and let them know they are not alone. Sadly, one of the things that makes me a little calmer about my ‘condition’, if I can even label it that way, is knowing that I am not the only one living in fear. So I hope my story helps someone out there fearing the future in the way I do. I suppose we should never fear our tomorrows and we should enjoy our todays, as we never know what’s coming. After all we might all sink under a major flood or a sudden natural disaster next week and why would my faulty ovaries matter then?!