A moment for clarification

I just wanted to take a moment to make some very clear. I'm pretty disturbed, because I received an email from someone who said about my hysterectomy, "It sounds like it was scary and not safe, and I am sorry you had to experience that."

Nothing could be further from the truth. Let me be quite explicit here - this was the best decision I have made in a long, long time. It was carefully researched, and I screened many doctors before being satisfied that I had found a competent and compassionate physician. I went through every option available to me before coming to this end point. I had multiple opinions, made my lists, checked them twice and then twice again. I am completely confident in the decisions that I made, and in the advice that I was given.

The care that I received before, during and after my surgery was exemplary. After so many years of dealing with less-than-stellar care, after learning to advocate for myself and schooling myself so thoroughly in this disease that the nurses kept asking me if I was a nurse myself, I knew that I was receiving fabulous care. Everyone was sympathetic to both the physical and emotional aspects of my treatment and my surgery. If there is one thing I carried away from all of this, it was that I finally got to the right team and that they took absolutely wonderful care of me.

And I feel better now, despite recovering from my surgery, than I have felt in a very long time. So much so that now I can't quite believe that I made it through last year. Family and close friends knew how bad it was, and even they didn't quite know just how bad. My husband and I know the full story. Things were very, very, very bad.

So to have someone make such a bizarre and quite frankly condescending statement to me was jaw-dropping.

If you had walked in my shoes over these past years - if you knew about all the pain, the ER visits, the doctors,the pain, the medications, the side effects, the pain, the slowly shrinking world that becomes yours when you are dealing with a chronic and worsening health issue, and oh yes, the pain - then you wouldn't dare say such a thing to me. Shame on you.