Hysterectomy recovery and fibroids: period silence can be dangerous

I didn’t realise that my periods were too heavy until I had an iron level of 1. This damned organ was supposed to bring me so much joy, but instead brought so much pain.

I have chosen to not deal with the emotional side of my hysterectomy because therapy is expensive.

“Hi, I have your uterus in a 5-litre bucket, when would you like to come pick it up?”

Two weeks ago, a little more than a month after my hysterectomy for massive fibroid tumors, that’s the call I got from the nurse at my surgeon’s office. It set off a spiral of logistical questions that I needed to ask myself.

Why did she need to specify the size of the bucket? Does this bucket have a handle? Does the bucket have a lid? A 5L bucket of uterus is too much to fit on my bike, am I allowed to take human organs on trams? I know they don’t have issues with people taking organs on trams when safely stored within their usual flesh vessel, but do people take issue with them when you have one in a bucket?

The bucket.

The question I hadn’t asked myself was why I had requested to get my uterus in the first place. I’ve told lots of jokes about wanting one of the larger fibroid tumours in a jar because if I couldn’t have a signed World Series baseball in the background of my Zoom calls, a baseball-sized tumour in a jar is the next best thing. But that’s not the whole picture.

Part of it is because I grew up in the kind of family where we talked about medical stuff. My grandpa was a doctor and reportedly kept human organs for dissection in the fridge at home all the time when he was a medical student, and my mum used his textbooks as light reading in primary school. For my 22nd birthday, because I’d asked for a pet turtle my whole life, my mum got me a turtle skeleton in a glass case. I still have it, his name is Percy.

"Am I allowed to take human organs on trams?". Alice Clarke with her mother.

Should I ever have bones surplus to requirements, I think that would be a cool thing to have jewellery made out of.

Besides, there were a lot of tumours in that uterus that took a lot of effort to grow, so they should be appreciated.

But another part of it is that it was a way to take control of the situation. For many uterus-owners, past, and present, there is so much emotion wrapped up in such a (normally) small organ. I have been through IVF in the past and felt that devastation when my body wouldn’t do the one thing I needed it to do.

Putting on display this damned organ, that was supposed to bring me so much joy, but instead brought so much metaphorical and literal pain, is a way to gain control over the situation. It’s like how prisoners used to be brought into the town square for ridicule, a way to show that they got the bastard who did all those awful things.

My uterus caused me to hemorrhage every month, losing cups of blood. It made me replan my future. It caused me years of heartbreak. And now it’s going to make a slightly odd decorative item in a jar, nestled amongst Lego sets, action figures, and video game statues.

I lived through this, I advocated for myself, I got the help I needed, and the demon was slain, its head soon to be mounted on my wall.

I have chosen to not deal with the emotional side of my hysterectomy because therapy is expensive and I’ve already spent too much on medical bills this year. Jars, methylated spirits, and battery-operated fairy lights are also expensive, but at least I get a nice decoration out of them.

It also stands as a talking point and a reminder. As women, we’re often too embarrassed to talk about periods after being told our whole lives that they’re taboo. It’s that silence that puts us in danger because I didn’t realise that my periods were too heavy until I had an iron level of 1.

You shouldn’t be scared to sleep because you’ll bleed through a night-time pad, or feel like you can’t go out for more than an hour at a time because you’ll bleed through multiple layers of protection. My body was miscarrying what it thought was a 4-5 month pregnancy, every month, and I thought it was fine because I had no idea what to expect. (My mother also needed a hysterectomy for fibroids 10 years before I was born, and somehow the topic of heavy periods never properly came up in conversation with my wife).

Even once you know something is wrong, it takes a lot of work, perseverance, and money to get someone to do anything about it. But these jars of somewhat unsightly tissue serve as a good reminder that you just need to keep pushing.

Unfortunately, to test the dozens of fibroid tumours for cancer (benign, thankfully) it’s been chopped to pieces, and thus the whole thing won’t look too good in a jar. At more than 13 times larger than what a uterus was supposed to be, it was probably a bit big to keep around long-term anyway. The cooler-looking tumours I’ll keep until they start to rot in their jars because they’re relatively small, less of a dominant reminder of this unpleasant chapter in my life.

I think I just needed to see it. Make sure this whole ordeal was over. And once seeing these uterus parts in their jars no longer brings a sense of triumph, I can bury it. Have a funeral for the life I once envisaged so I can get back to building a different, perhaps even better future.