Follow up was today. It wasn't NEARLY as scary as I expected, and I had company so I wasn't alone. Thankfully I spent the week googling and was very prepared.
Basically, my doctor thinks I have one or more functioning cysts. This means that they are producing hormones autonomously. My brain is not controlling them as it should be. The cyst(s) is/are producing so much estrogen and progesterone that it's telling my brain not to create any FSH (follicle stimulating hormones, which makes eggs mature) or LH (luteinizing hormone, which tells the ovary to release the egg). That's just one theory. There really isn't a way to be absolutely sure.
Another theory is Kallmann Syndrome, which is a form of hypogonadotropic hypogonadism. It's a genetic disorder that messes with the pituitary gland and/or hypothalamus. This is less likely, because one of the main symptoms in over 50% of cases is loss of sense of smell. And I can smell things like crazy. So I'm not really going to worry about that one.
Back to the cysts. We're going to continue with surgery, set for sometime in September. In the meantime, I'll have blood work to rule out any malignancy (hint: cancer/bad things) just to be sure there isn't anything else we need to take care of.
He says that the best thing to do for the cysts is to completely remove them laparoscopically, which is where they make a tiny incision in your bellybutton and use cameras instead of cutting you wide open. Instead of just draining the fluid out of the cysts, called aspiration, he will cut open the ovary and remove the cysts, cyst walls and all. The reason for this being that if he leaves the walls of the cysts, like is done with just aspiration, there's a good chance that they will fill right back up with fluid, and then we'll be right back where we started.
This is a basic side view of my left ovary. The biggest cyst is on the top, with some smaller, but still considered big, cysts underneath it. It's like small balloons inside a bigger balloon. My doctor wants to make an incision in the top of my ovary, remove the top/biggest cyst, and then try to remove the smaller ones that are under it.
Because of the position of the bottom cysts, the surgery may get a little more complicated. His main goal is to remove the cysts and save as much of the ovary as he can. However, if it starts bleeding too much it will put me in danger, and the entire ovary will need to be removed. He says this isn't very likely, but to be safe my surgery has been moved from the surgery center to Willowbrook Methodist hospital in Houston.
We still don't know anything about the conditions inside of my uterus. We won't be able to find out until the surgery in September. So it's still a bit of a wait until we will know 100% whether or not we will need a surrogate. Once I am recovered, we can do more blood work to see if the hormone issues resolve themselves once the cysts are gone. If not, I am not sure what we'll do from there. We didn't discuss it. One step at a time!
That's all for now. I'll keep you all updated!
