Your neighbor hired you to pick all of the carrots in their garden. They offer you two tools: a shovel or a blowtorch. Let’s say you pick the blowtorch. Way more badass. You blowtorch the whole garden, and all of the green tops to the carrots disappear. Job done!
A week later you get a call from your neighbor. He says that the green tops to the carrots are back, so you go back over. Again you use the blowtorch to get rid of all of the green in the garden. Week after week you are forced to come back. So let’s pause and pick door number 2: the shovel. You use the shovel and discover that the green leafy bit is actually attached to a whole orange carrot! You use the shovel to dig up all of the carrots. Weeks go by and you receive no calls. Success!
So, why am I talking about carrots? Because your endometriosis is represented by the carrots in this situation. The shovel is excision and the blowtorch is ablation.
Your endometriosis lesions can attach pretty deep in your body. While ablation may look like the way to go, all it is doing is inflaming your endo more. By using the so called blowtorch, your endometriosis is not being attacked at the root. Just going after the surface will do nothing but aggravate your body for weeks to come. This is why you don’t have pain relief after ablation surgery, and why you may keep going in for more and more surgerys with no real results. On the other hand, if you cut out the entire lesion, you might have a bigger wound directly after surgery, but in a couple of weeks you might just be endo free.
So, you’re probably wondering why no one has brought this up to you. Tell me about it. After 2 and a half years of living in the GYN office, I had never heard the word excision. Excision takes a lot longer than ablation because the surgeons are dedicated to getting every scrap of endo. It is more intense because of the length of time under anesthesia as well as the fact that all of the lesions they cut out leave a little cut that needs to heal. Ablation, the surgeons are usually set up for a 45 min surgery, they look around, burn a couple of things and get out. Normal GYNs with no training in endometriosis surgeries do ablation all the time. Why are we gonna let people who are not trained cut us up to then send us away and gaslight us if we ever come back? NO! I AM SICK OF IT! I HAVE BEEN LIVING IT FOR 3 YEARS!
So, moral of the story excision is the way to go. Research it. Interview surgeons. Put the time in now, so post-surgery you can go live life. Go be your age, I bet it feels kinda nice.