Procedure

My Uterine Artery Embolization will be Thursday January 31st at 10:00 am.

The procedure should take an hour and a half, though it might take longer according to the doctor, because my artery that is feeding the malformation is so large.  Usually these things come off of smaller vessels.

I have (as do most females) two arteries feeding blood to my uterus.  These arteries are usually rather small, but mine are glorious.  I have a good strong mutated artery taking blood to my uterus.  The arteries usually feed into smaller arterioles, which feed into capillaries, which then go to venules, which then lead to veins.  But my large artery is fused directly to a large vein.  And every now and then (on Mondays) the fused vessel ruptures and that large artery pumps blood OUT of me until my body can cramp down and restrict the vessels long enough for them to clot over.  If ever my body were too tired to cramp the muscles down around that ruptured vessel, I would just keep bleeding, all the way to empty.  That is why I'm defined as Hemodynamically Unstable.  It is the only way in which I am unstable.  (That's for you Christian, I'm nipping those jokes in the bud here and now!)

Tomorrow they will give me some medicines to make me sleepy, relaxed, yet still able to comply with commands, and a local anesthetic, and then they will go in through my femoral artery and block both uterine arteries (my huge glorious ones). I will be kept in the hospital over night, under observation, to make sure that large femoral artery closes up, and to manage the pain.  For a few days I won't have any blood going to my uterus.  Apparently that is painful.  Then, the body will "re-wire" itself and grow new vessels to the uterus and it should be up and running again within a week or so.

That might not be an exact description, but it's pretty close, and there are residual effects.  I will have a much harder time getting pregnant (actually I'll get pregnant fine, the baby will just have a difficult time implanting and soon after finding out I'm pregnant, I will miscarry) and then should I get pregnant again, my pregnancy will be high risk and might not go full term.  There is also a chance that I'll have a normal healthy pregnancy.  ("So you're saying there's a chance!!")  Russell and I really want another baby, so keep your fingers crossed that nothing goes wrong on the table, because the back up plan is to take out the whole uterus.