So I thought it might be useful or edifying somehow to have a record of my experience getting spayed (haha) via a bilateral salpingectomy, both for myself and for anyone else who is considering having the surgery. I've wanted to have a permanent form of birth control since I became sexually active, so this experience is decidedly colored by that 20 year desire! I'm still on pain meds, and the immediacy of this surgery was definitely informed by the political situation, so forgive me if this account is a bit slushed :)
I'll just start at the beginning. The first week of December 2016, I went in for the pre-appointment at Swedish OB/GYN (Woman's Center) to meet the surgeon and sign the paperwork. This appointment was pretty short and mostly comprised of her wheedling with limpid eyes "Are you SUUUUUUURE you don't want baAAAyYYAAbies?" which was obviously irritating but also legally required. There's a long history in the US of involuntary sterilization, only ending officially in the 1970s, and though I am not in the primary historically targeted groups the medical community has made up for this by swinging hard the other direction by needing assurance that the patient in in a sound state of mind, is not being coerced by ignorance or outside forces, and is capable of considering alternatives. I hate all the alternatives and also hate babies, which I made sure to repeat at every opportunity. She was sad but let me sign the paperwork stating that I understand I'll never be pregnant again. I don't know whether having had an abortion before, about 15 years ago, made any difference to the outcome of gaining permission. It was strongly implied that having given live birth, being unhealthy overall, or being older than 33 would have made this a a smoother process, but who really knows. Since this is a voluntary procedure they do technically have the right to refuse, but it doesn't seem particularly likely. This visit is also where I found out that it is now common practice to actually remove the tubes in entire, rather than seal them. It is more effective and has the amazing added benefit of eliminating all but the barest chance of ovarian cancer! Since approximately 1/70 ovary-bearers will have some form of this in their lifetime, that's a lovely side effect.
Once you sign the paperwork that, in essence, informs the patient that she cannot sue the doctor for the procedure being permanent, apologizes for the genocidally racist history of the medical community and directs you to the standard "what it means to consent to surgery" plate, you are legally required to wait 20 days before the surgery can even be scheduled. This is to officially give you time to change your mind. Irritating, since I was hoping at the time to have it done by Christmas but there yah go. I'm glad on a certain level that they are extremely concerned with patient agency and allow for processing time, since rational ethical decisions are oftentimes made in slow motion (compared to the speed of apparent causality!), but this was a decision that I'd formed over the course of many years and had only never acted on it due to lack of funds, fear, and honestly laziness. It's still good to see others being protected as a point of legal policy!
This visit, where they wheedled and whined and went over the whys and I signed a piece of paper, took about 40 minutes and cost me $170 after insurance. I haven't paid that bill yet, and they did the procedure, so we shall see. NO TAKE BACKS! I will say that Swedish OBGYN is clean and lovely, all of the phone support people are helpful and friendly, and if you can afford to have gynecology done there it's thousands of light years better than Planned Parenthood. I love you, PP, but you are always understaffed.
After the 20 days they started calling me to try and schedule the surgical, which I found pleasantly proactive. Less so was the attempts to actually figure out when the surgery would be possible. I don't know whether it's just Swedish, but they were incredibly booked out for many months and we were trying to find a surgery slot for sometime in March...April...June? The procedure itself is very short (more on that later), and I wasn't restricted to only working with the surgeon I spoke with, but the doctors prefer to only have 3-4 in a day and there literally wasn't any available times. I got the appointment as early as I did because a person named Rickie at the front desk was AMAAAZING and put a cancellation notification alert on his computer. He called me within a week with this late-in-the-day cancellation for January and celebrated on the phone with me. I heart you Rickie. Let's be friends.
So from there, I dealt with a lot of confirmation calls from people who seemed to only be available when I was in class, and all the assorted phone tree bullshit, but the en result was that I was sent a presurgical packet (that didn't arrive until the day before) with general info about how to prepare the flesh for being mutilated. I started to feel the depression/disassociation really strongly around this, since I'd never had anyone cutting into my flesh without incense burning and psychosexual electronic music and plenty of illegal drugs and depression, so the associations are not particularly professional. It felt like I was being coerced to reduce myself to a pile.of meat rather than taking actions toward a goal associated with my personhood. Of course, this is all standard surgery concerns and it's useful to know this about myself. The anesthesiologist front desk woman at Swedish Cherry Hill was the only humanizing force in all of this preparation. She has an outrageously sexy voice and was interested in the answers I gave to her questions in a personal way, asking follow ups when they clearly weren't necessary and generally making me feel human.
Every single medical professional I spoke to once I had an appointment asked me to tell them, using my own words, what procedure I was having done and what the results of it would be. Hopefully they actually logged the entirety of my response, which usually ended with a "...and I'm so excited to never EVER MAKE BABIES" but probably not likely.
You're supposed to stop drinking liquids 4 hours before check in, which was scheduled 2 hours before the surgery time, but I read the official statements from the anesthesiologists association of america who, with multiple per-reviewed studies, have determined that 2 hours not only is better for patient happiness but also helps find veins (dehydration sucks). So I stopped drinking coffee around 10:30 am, day of, with a 12:30 check in. Aspiration is hugely overstated and is based on garbage medical assumptions from the 1950s. I trust recent peer review, thanks science.
After I checked in, and it was established that the person with me was going to be my emergency contact and would drive my doped ass home later, we waited for about 30 minutes. As a side note, I did not inform my parents that I was having this surgery done. My mother is perpetually in a state of waiting for her grandkids and disbelieving my desire to be childfree (and my father would tattle on me). I didn't want to hear anyone telling me I was making a mistake. It's not that I thought I'd change my mind, but that I knew I had to be steadfast to prevent myself from putting this off again. It's important to me, once I've started a process, to carry through. Otherwise I tend to sink back down into depression lies about my incapacity to do anything properly, and I absolutely didn't want that to happen in this case.
Went to the back once my name was called and changed into a hideous gown and sticky foot socks. I was attached to a blood pressure monitor, asked to urinate (for a pregnancy test, though they didn't tell me that at the time) and then they came to take my blood. I neglected to inform them that I have a vaso-vagal response to blood removal and passed the fuck out, but that's normal for me. MY BLOOD I NEED ALL OF IT.
Once I stabilized, we walked to pre surgery where I waited for a little over an hour, bored out of my mind and starting to get freaked out. At this point, I was still permitted to have my buddy with me, which helped keep me feeling like a human and not a neglected medical experiment, Some head nurse types came and put a needle in my hand for the saline solution and gave me a cocktail of OTC pain meds for inflammation so I'd be nice and plumped up for surgery, and once that bag emptied after about 20-30 minutes, they switched the plug for the first round of drugs and wheeled me away to surgery. This is the point where you can't have buddies, but I was instantly fucked up on magical liquid valium so I didn't care.
They gave me more drugs and told me it would be fast. It was.
Woke up in recovery and was super weepy! I felt unloved, existentially meaningless and generally lonely in the universe...
(Here's an edit: I'm finishing this more than a year and a half later, I didn't remember feeling weepy so clearly I've lost some nuance, and my care buddy is now my moderately-loathed ex, so it's gonna get a little terser from here.)
...Until of course the recovery nurse rolled over and asked if i wanted more Fentanyl. Once I kinda worked that one out (UM YES DUH I LUV OPIATES WILL I BE IN TROUBLE OMG this is the one time i wont be in trouble!!! "umm yes?") i think things go better. Flashes of laughing with the other recovery nurses, being wheeled to the car and giggling on the way home, staggering to my bed, and noticing i can feel my insides. I don't like feeling my insides, time for pills!
It took about a week before walking around was comfortable at all, but I got super tired from hip-leg-back movement and sitting up was pretty uncomfortable. The pain was clearly monstrous, but I'm very good at staying totally incapacitated with meds and cannabis. The teeth only bit me once or twice, and it felt nothing at all like cramps except that snapping rubber band sensation, piNGG. I was very nervous about my first period after the surgery, which would normally be about 9 days after, but it was very normal (i.e., painful and miserable, but hooray Percoset!!!) even though I'd been throwing out some real blood that whole time between. I would absolutely have been in a bad place if nobody had been around to help me do things like (stand up long enough to) prepare food, buy weed, empty the catbox, but I was alone for most of the day so it's not like I was reduced to infant state even in the first week. It would have been posh if I had a loving partner, but even with just a self centered junkie fuckboy neighbor it was fine. Worst part was the massive bruising around the entry wounds and the "swelly belly" which is severe inflammation from abdominal surgery that springs out when you exert the abdominal muscles like, at all. Swelling always feels gross, and swelling below your navel is super disheartening. I had to be "careful" about that for about 3 months, but that might be because I was doing things like walking around a shop after work when I was supposed to be off my feet almost entirely. That's recommended for 4-6 weeks, so 3 months was my wages of sin.
The wounds were honestly a little weird, one entry point was directly above my right hipbone and it still itches sometimes. There were clearly rollable scar tubes on both sides for nearly a year, and I could actively pick at them for most of that time, but 18 months on the scars are just little Philips head blemishes. Not being able to become pregnant, uterine or ectopic, is the best thing. All of the other sterilized people I've met since then see us as being in a cool kids club, which is fun, and I spent about a year being intensely delighted every time I remembered--it's like stepping outside of biological time, becoming something post-mammalian, post-evolution and I have the photos on my fridge to prove it. When I picked up the forementioned photos in my follow-up appointment, the doc also pointed out that my liver looked very healthy, so it's overall worthy of raising a toast to barren spinsterhood!
That's all I got really.
