Out for Blood: After Years of Medical Gaslighting, a Hysterectomy Set Me Free

One woman’s battle with the period from hell.

I had my last period on January 19, 2023. I remember it clearly because it was also the day that I had a radical hysterectomy.

When the nurse told me they were ready to take me into surgery, I reminded her that I was still wearing a tampon. She suggested I remove it and use a panty liner.

“Trust me when I tell you that this is not a panty liner situation,” I told her. It had been 16 days of full-fledged bleeding. The nurse looked perplexed but wheeled me into surgery wearing nothing but a hospital gown and a super plus tampon. 

Some women’s periods go gently into the night, fading away over a few years until they are gone. Not me. My uterus and the rest of my reproductive system was yanked from my body kicking and screaming. It was one of the best days of my life.

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A short list of the things I have bled on: car seats, bus seats, a yoga mat, a leather sofa, a bar stool, the weight bench at the gym, and every set of sheets I have ever owned since the age of 12. 

I’ve ruined countless pairs of nice panties. So many that I eventually gave up and wore nothing but black cotton briefs so that I wouldn’t have to throw my underwear away every month. Some women buy La Perla. My most exciting lingerie moment was the invention of Thinx period underpants. When they started selling them at CVS, well, I practically had to fan myself. By then, I was pretty much living in them because I had no clue when I would start bleeding. Knowing I could buy a pair on the fly was great news.

I used to say my period was like a drunk party guest: sloppy, unpredictable, and embarrassing. I might know roughly when she would show up but I never knew when she was going to leave, or the havoc she’d wreak.

My period wasn’t always a nightmare, though. I went on the pill as a teenager, taking it until my 30s with only the occasional break. For most of those years, it was predictable and my cramps were light, but when I was 23 I saw the first sign of trouble. I had been off the pill for a couple of months and felt fine until one day, driving my little brother home from camp, I felt a gush between my legs.

When I pulled the car into my parents’ driveway, I got out and saw that the cloth seat of my stepmother’s car was soaked in blood. I was in shorts and it was now running down my legs. I didn’t want my brother to see it—he was only five years old—so I wrapped his beach towel around me and pretended I was cold. Nothing to see here!

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Ten years later, I was living in San Francisco and in a long-term relationship when I skipped a period despite being back on the pill. I thought I might be pregnant. I was nervous—we were broke as a joke—but I was also thrilled because we were in love and I was ready. When I found out it was just a blip in my cycle, as my doctor called it, I decided to stop taking the pill altogether. I told my partner, Byron, that it was because the pill didn’t agree with me anymore, which wasn’t entirely untrue.

In truth, I hoped an accident would happen and I would become pregnant. 

Cut to a couple of years later. No accident had happened and we were actively trying to conceive. My period was getting more and more painful every month. 

I was 38 and panicked that I had waited too long. But I tried to stay positive by chalking my intense menstrual pain and failure to conceive up to stress. My mother had been sick for nearly five years and I was flying back and forth to New York a couple of times a year, which made baby-making difficult to time and added tons of pressure to an already fraught experience. There were easy explanations for everything that was happening—except the pain.

After my mother died, Byron took me on a road trip to cheer me up. I was hoping to get the procreation underway, but practically as soon as we left the house, my period came out of nowhere—and it was a bloodbath. I had to sit on a towel and we had to pull over frequently so that I could change my tampon and pad. Sexy. 

The first night, we arrived at our campsite after dark and set up our tent. I was too sick from cramps to drink or eat much so I took Advil and laid down in the tent. I was starting to drift off when an overwhelming nausea hit me. You have ten seconds before you puke everywhere, I remember thinking. I freed myself from the tent, crawled out and spewed all over the soft dirt. 

That night marked the beginning of the “vomit phase” of my life, where my cramps were so excruciating that I threw up every single month on the first day of my period. This went on for nearly ten years.

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A short list of places I have vomited from menstrual cramps: trash cans, down the front of my shirt, into plastic bags, behind a parked car in the PetSmart parking lot, on my knees in a stall in the bathroom at the office.

Once, I was so nauseous that I had to leave work. I was in a new job and didn’t know my boss well enough to explain what was happening to me, so I made up a flimsy excuse and got back into my car, praying that I would make it back to San Francisco from Berkeley before the puking started. 

I didn’t. 

When I was about halfway home, I felt the vomit rising. I had no time to pull over so I grabbed the closest receptacle and held it over my mouth. After violently barfing into an empty Starbucks cup doing 55 miles an hour across the Bay Bridge, I worried someone would report me as a drunk driver.

During these years, doctor after doctor told me to take Advil and get on with it. They all questioned me relentlessly when I asked for stronger pain medication. I explained that I needed it just so I could pull my head out of the toilet bowl and go to work. One after another, doctors shifted the conversation away from why I was experiencing this level of pain to how I was choosing to manage it. They lectured me on the dangers of opiates as I sat bleeding through my paper gown, as if I might not have heard of opiate addiction and the grip it had on the country.  And the answer was always no, they would not prescribe me a stronger medication. I was told to take Advil. 

Female pain being dismissed by healthcare professionals is not unique to me. An analysis of 981 emergency room visits found that women with acute abdominal pain were up to 25 percent less likely to be given opiate painkillers than their male counterparts. When they are administered pain relief, on average women wait 15 minutes longer for medication than men.

Another study found that women who report having chronic pain conditions are more likely than men to be labeled as having a mental health condition and prescribed psychotropic drugs instead of pain medication. In other words, they think we are hysterical.

I told several doctors that I had a strong feeling that something was wrong in my body. Each time, I was told some version of the following: Some women have it harder than others. You may have a low pain threshold. Take Advil. Try hot baths. Buy a heating pad. 

It doesn’t matter how smart you are, medical gaslighting can happen to anyone. And when it is something as run of the mill as a painful period, it’s easy for doctors to dismiss. After all, cramps are incredibly common. It was the severity of mine that no one seemed to grasp, but when you are told over and over that something is no big deal, it’s even hard not to second-guess yourself. 

Most times I left my annual gynecological appointments in tears. I was utterly helpless, and truthfully, by then I couldn’t really even imagine being free of this thing. I counted the years until menopause might relieve me of the pain.  But first, I needed to have a baby.

For five years, I desperately tried to get pregnant. We tried naturally for a year and then sought assistance. My bloodwork looked impeccable. I was told that I had lots of follicles and that my FSH numbers looked great. All signs pointed to a successful pregnancy. Some women just need a little help, my doctor said encouragingly.

We started conservatively but after multiple failed rounds of IUI and a mini-IVF, we decided to pull out the big guns and borrowed money for one round of IVF. We got four embryos and immediately did a fresh transfer with two of them. 

It failed. Afterward, probably thanks to the drugs, my menstrual pain was worse than ever.

When I went in for an exam before my second transfer, my doctor found a large cyst on my right ovary. I couldn’t do the transfer unless I had it removed. During that operation, my surgeon said she looked for signs of endometriosis, which might explain my pain, but found nothing. She removed the cyst and, in the process, my right ovary was all but destroyed. I had been warned that it could happen but I didn’t have a choice. I just wanted to get these two other embryos inside of me. They were my last hope. 

That cycle failed as well, and because my right ovary, which had been producing most of the follicles, was no longer viable, I was told there was nothing I could do. There was no explanation, just a pat on the shoulder and a condolence card sent from the fertility clinic. 

I went for a second opinion with a big whig at UCSF. She said that unless we had another $20K to gamble with, I should stop trying. Maybe a donor egg would work, she wondered. Or a surrogate? Those weren’t options for us since we had already borrowed money to do the IVF. 

It was over. I had failed.

After the appointment, I stood by the elevator with Byron in numb silence, staring at my wavy reflection in the elevator door. My face and body was distorted. I didn’t look like myself, which seemed fitting since my childless future felt just as blurry.

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Starting around the age of 47, I got some relief when inexplicably, the vomiting just stopped. I still had the terrible cramps but the puking was replaced by crushing headaches—at least I could hide a headache. 

But the bleeding only got worse, which I truly had not thought possible. One night, I sat on our beautiful brown leather couch with a heating pad and a cup of tea, desperate to relieve my cramps. After about a half hour I stood to use the bathroom. When I sat on the toilet, I saw that my pants were saturated and I had been sitting in a pool of blood. 

I cleaned myself up, changed my clothes and went back into the living room only to discover that one cushion of my sofa was blood-soaked. This, even though I was wearing a super plus tampon, a pair of period undies, and jeans.

I sobbed in frustration as I scrubbed the sofa cushions but the blood wouldn’t come out. It was a permanent reminder of the horror show that was my body.

By the age of 50, when most of my friends were reporting that they had begun missing periods, mine were becoming more frequent and longer. I tried a few different birth control pills but the low-dose pills, which are universally recommended for women over 50, didn’t work. I bled right through them almost every day of the month.

Because of the extended heavy bleeding and the diminishing time between my periods, my doctor was confused. Things should be slowing down at your age, not gaining momentum, she said, finally sounding concerned.

A painful uterine biopsy was inconclusive so she sent me for an ultrasound to check once again to see if fibroids were the culprit. During the test, the technician moved the wand left and right, up and down for what felt like a very long time. I was no stranger to ultrasounds but this was unusual. Finally, she apologized. “Your ovaries are hiding from me today,” she said. She removed the wand and I got dressed.

I didn’t know that it was an omen.

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At my next appointment, my gynecologist said that the ultrasound showed that my uterus had grown two centimeters since my previous ultrasound two years earlier.

“Well, that doesn’t sound good,” I said.

It was not, she said. Her theory was that I had a type of endometriosis called adenomyosis, which is hard to diagnose.  In “normal” endometriosis, the uterine tissue grows outside the uterus, sometimes enveloping the ovaries and fallopian tubes and making it difficult to conceive. In those cases, it’s relatively easy to see the endometriosis via surgery but with adenomyosis, the cells grow into the lining of the uterus, allowing it to stealthily grow out of sight until your uterus becomes enlarged. 

I asked if this might explain why my seemingly healthy embryos didn’t implant. She wouldn’t speculate but said it was possible that my uterus might have been “inhospitable.”

Then she suggested an IUD to slow the bleeding, and I lost it. It’s hard to stand your ground in a paper gown but I told her that it was ridiculous to suggest that an infertile 50-year-old woman get an IUD. My body would outsmart it, I told her. I knew it to be true.

“There is something wrong with me,” I said. “This isn’t normal. I want this broken equipment gone. Honestly, I feel like it is trying to kill me.”

“Well, yes,” she said hesitantly. “A hysterectomy would definitely solve the problem.” 

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I woke from my surgery to see my doctor hovering close to my face. “Were we right,” I asked. “Did I have endo in my uterus?”

I knew they would send my tissue out for testing to see if endometriosis had played a role in my troubles but I needed to know. It turns out, she didn’t have to wait for the lab results.

“Yes,” she said softly, grasping my hand. “You were really sick. You should feel validated.”

I went into the recovery room and fell back to sleep. I didn’t learn until later that my maybe, possibly “inhospitable” reproductive system was something closer to a haunted house covered in cobwebs.

When my doctor opened me up, she saw that my organs were fused together with endometriosis, which grows like tentacles throughout the body if left unchecked. She said she’d never seen anything like it. My ovaries were, essentially, hog-tied behind my uterus, which is why the ultrasound technician couldn’t find them. My uterus was adhered to my bladder and rectum and the spaces in between were filled with endometrial tissue. 

My doctor said that she took one look and knew she couldn’t perform the surgery on her own. Instead, the director of gynecologic oncology came in to do the surgery. Later, he told me that the surgery was “very, very complicated… It looked like someone had poured glue inside your body.”

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As I sat in the car on the way home from the hospital, I had one overwhelming thought: You are a badass. 

I felt so empowered. I had known in my soul that there was something deeply wrong with my reproductive system. And despite years of being casually dismissed, I had followed my intuition and done what I knew needed to be done and that I had been RIGHT. 

In the year since my surgery, I still feel like a badass for taking charge of my body but it hasn’t been that simple. Once I understood the extent of the damage the endo had caused, I spent weeks future-tripping, working through the fear of what could have happened to my organs if I hadn’t insisted on the surgery.

And then a deep grief rose in me, one which took months to shake. I mourned the time and money I had spent chasing a baby. I cried over all the years I had judged myself and my body so harshly for not being able to conceive. Most of all, I felt so sad about the years I spent trying to convince myself that the pain was normal and that I was making a big deal out of nothing, all because my doctors said so.

Next, as often happens with grief, a searing anger took over. No one had listened to me. It had not been one bad actor but many doctors who dropped the ball over the years. I believe they were operating in good faith, but good intentions aren’t enough.

So, my quiet revenge is to talk about it. I tell anyone who wants to know—and some people who almost certainly don’t—about my hysterectomy. Some people look uncomfortable or squeamish. Men, especially, don’t love the conversation. 

I honestly don’t care. The people who don’t want to hear what happened to me make me want to talk about it more. And so I do. Because, more often than not, when I share my experience, someone will nod and say quietly, yes. “Me, too. It happens to me, too. I thought I was the only one.”

In those moments, I do what I wish someone had done for me. I touch their arm and I say, “This isn’t your fault. You aren’t imagining it. Something is not right. I believe you. And you don’t have to live this way anymore.”

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