Time to vent

Geez, I'm still sick.  I'm hoping that if I stay home and talk to no one, it will save my voice because I've pretty much got laryngitis from all the coughing I've been doing.  I still have a lot of bad coughing and congestion.  I know it will get better, and it has, but I'm impatient.  Shocker, right?

I had my appointment today to get the endometrial biopsy done.  If you have never had this experience, just count yourself very blessed.  I had a couple of friends, who have already had it done, warn me that it was going to be painful but I seriously had no clue.  I thought it couldn't be too much worse than a pap, right?  Um, wrong, so very, very wrong.  The physician's assistant, who was doing it, was trying her best to distract me from the pain but thankfully it didn't take too long.

The thing that bothered me more than anything wasn't the procedure itself but her attitude toward me.  When I was booking the appointment, the woman told me she's fantastic, that she has a really great disposition.  I didn't meet that side of her today until she was doing the procedure.  When she came in and I described having three periods in one month, she told me the cause was my weight.  She put it out there just like that.  She said that when people are overweight, the hormones in our bodies become imbalanced so I'm probably producing too much estrogen.  She said the best thing for me to do was to lose weight.  She also said that I have greater chance of having uterine cancer due to my weight.

So I'm sitting there on the exam table, naked from the waist down save for a paper napkin draped over my lap.  How am I supposed to react to this?  I felt like she was saying to me, "Your eating caused this problem and if you end up with cancer, you only have yourself to blame."  That's not what she said to me, but oh my gosh that's what I heard.  The only thing I could tell her in response is that although I am working on losing weight now (I didn't feel the need to tell her I'm in the pre-op stage of having a gastric bypass), I have concerns about the extra periods now.  She did proceed with the biopsy and then put me on medication to help with the hormone imbalance she feels I have.  I'll get the results in 3-5 days, a new hormone medication and then I have a follow-up appointment with a gynecologist at the end of the month.

I left that appointment in a lot of physical pain from the procedure, but also in a lot of emotional pain.  There was another circumstance of being left to feeling as though I was being judged.  I mean, did my weight cause me to have skin cancer as well?  I understand that weight is a significant factor in a lot of physical ailments we have as a society, but I did not need to be treated as though I was actually wasting her time when I just did this to myself, as least according to her logic.  It's hard to be dignified in these situations when all I wanted to do was tell her, "Look, I'm scared right now.  I don't know why this is happening to me but I do know the last thing I need is for you to treat me as though I am the sole cause of whatever this is."  I'm not even at my heaviest weight, far from it actually.  I just felt tremendously vulnerable today being naked on that table and still sick.  I needed a hug, not to be beaten down.  I realize that weight can be a cause, but there are also a lot of other reasons and there was none of that present in our conversation.

I'm moving on from here.  I'll hear from her in a few days, hopefully with good news.  In the meantime, I'm planning on taking good care of myself this weekend so that I can somehow shake the last of this flu.