So I mentioned on Twitter a while back that I had an exciting medical crisis while travelling in Germany, and I figured I might as well share the details for anyone who cares. The tl;dr version is that I had a minor surgery and I'm totally fine now.

As I've mentioned here before, I've recently lost quite a lot of weight (in the range of 85 lbs at last reckoning, yay!). This is great and happy-making and all that but it has two less wonderful effects on my general well-being:

1) I am always always cold. Always. (This goes away once I adjust to having less insulation. *bundles up*)

2) My menstrual cycle, always a bit irregular, goes temporarily insane. I spot, I bleed, I miss periods, I have extra ones. It's a big old mess, and that is coming from someone who has always had insanely heavy periods to the point of taking iron pills and having my hemoglobin monitored, etc.

Anyway, the week before I left on my month-long adventure, I got my period. "Yay!" said I, naively, "for this means that I will not have to travel and deal with this shit for at least the first part of my trip!" The period was heavy-ish, normal for me, and ended a few days before I was set to depart. However, standing in the airport and queuing for my check-in, I felt something a little weird. When I ran to the bathroom after an interminable wait in line, sure enough: period. Again. Seven days after the last. WTF, body.

I couldn't exactly do much about it; I was about to board a flight out of the country. I flailed and groused and changed pads/emptied my menstrual cup several times over the next few hours (see above re my heavy heavy periods). By the time we got to Germany, things had settled to a more manageable level, and a few days later my period had apparently stopped altogether.

"Maybe," I thought, still naively, "maybe that was just a late addition to the actual period I had last week." And went on with the trip.

Well. The next week -- one week after the airport bloodbath, and two after the "first" period -- I had weird cramps while out for dinner in Ingolstadt. (Heavy awful periods aside, my one menstrual blessing is that I generally don't have cramps, and when I do they are quite mild and last a day at most.) I got back to the hotel and was greeted by -- my period. For the third Monday in a row. Odd, no? It was very very heavy, almost right away.

(If you don't want the gory details, you may want to skip the rest. Here, go look at puppies.)

I was passing massive clot after massive clot. My high-capacity menstrual cup combined with pads couldn't keep up. I was lying down for 30 minutes at a time before I'd lurch awake and sprint to the bathroom to empty my cup and change my pad all over again. It was like Iwojima. It was horrifying and endless and it was starting to freak *me* out. *Me*, the one with the insanely heavy periods as a matter of course. I barely slept all night, and it didn't let up. I whiled away the anxious hours iMessaging xenakis and asking her to assure me I wasn't going to die in a hotel in Ingolstadt. She agreed with me while expressing due concern. (The hotel wifi crapped out in the middle of this conversation, leaving Xen hanging for two days before I could assure her that I hadn't in fact died in a hotel in Ingolstadt.)

The next morning we had a long drive to Prague. The bus had a toilet, I figured, and I was wearing black yoga pants and had a metric ton of pads. I could do this. I didn't know if I had a choice, after all. It's hard to pull over an entire tour group (I was travelling with 30 others) for one person's uterus. But I was still worried; I wasn't really able to go for more than 10-15 minutes without emptying my cup *and* changing my pad. Again, it seemed like far more blood loss than was reasonable. Add to this the fact that I'd weighed myself that morning and discovered I'd lost over two pounds in the past twenty-four hours. I felt see-through, and wobbly, and scared as hell, if I'm being honest. I confided my problem in a few of my friends on tour, who expressed sympathy/concern but didn't, I think, grasp how bad it was.

We got on the bus; I stayed seated as long as I could, but finally I had to stand up and face the tiny toilet. I immediately bled down the insides of both thighs, all the way to my knees. Around my menstrual cup and through my overnight pad. It was just -- fucked up and wrong. I did my best to clean up in the toilet but this was -- I knew it was not going to work. We stopped at a rest stop while I was in the toilet still, and I made it only as far as the inside of the gas station before I was digging for 20 cents and rushing into the bathroom to empty the cup again. This was fucking insane. Just fucking *insane*. It seemed like I literally couldn't empty my cup often enough; every time I moved, stood, took three steps, I could feel more blood rushing out. I gave up the idea of getting through this with any kind of silent dignity and cornered the LPN in our group, explained the situation. She listened, said "*how* often?" and then conferred with the RN in our group.

They called an ambulance.

(This story is actually even more complicated and involved a phone consultation with a friend of a person, who knew someone who was a doctor -- and then a semi hit our tour bus, no *really*, and I was only tangentially aware of all of this through a haze of anxiety and lightheadedness and feeling pale as hell. I also choked down part of a sandwich because I felt like blood sugar could only help. This was dumb, for the record.)

So -- ambulance ride! My first emergency room visit! In Germany!

I won't bother getting into the details here, but I had reason to be grateful for my smattering of German and even more grateful for the EMT's very good English. I kept sort of wondering embarrassedly if I was overreacting or being a hypochondriac; in the middle of this feeling I would sort of drift into a light doze. It struck me that the latter action was probably proving the former thought groundless but I don't think my brain was at its best because I kept on feeling a bit silly over the whole thing, like I was playing sick lying on a stretcher in an ambulance.

At the hospital they took blood and hooked me up to an IV and hurried me in to see the gynecologist. I've never had a pelvic exam while bleeding before, let alone bleeding the way I was bleeding. I will always remember the gynecologist shaking her head as she tried and failed to visualize my cervix, saying to her attending, "es kommt und kommt". Guys, she *couldn't see my cervix through the blood*. Whoa. They also did a transvaginal ultrasound, that horrifying-sounding thing, but I was a bit too woozy and weak to really have much reaction to the whole thing other than being vaguely surprised at having an ultrasound wand up my hoohah.

They didn't see anything wrong with my uterus or ovaries, but given my hemoglobin (low) and the fact that I was literally dripping all over the floor, they seemed to think urgent action was needed. Over the course of that exam it went from "well, we may have to do a D&C but we should wait until it's been six hours since you ate" to "yeah, you're having a D&C right this minute, as soon as we can possibly get you in the OR, we will just have to roll with the aspiration risk."

There is even more detail I'm skipping here, but the moments that are clear in my mind are:

- the nurse helping me into my hospital gown saying "oh my Gott" at how much I was bleeding. I felt some small pride/affirmation at being able to freak out a German gyno nurse in an emergency ward with my blood loss. NOT FAKING IT OKAY.

- lying on the stretcher in the hallway waiting for the orderly to take me up to surgery; she asked "how are you feeling?" and I helplessly said, "I'm scared," and burst into tears. This -- this is *so* not how I roll, y'all. I blame the blood loss.

- in the OR, the anesthesiologist injected what he called "a welcome cocktail" to make me feel "sort of high" (you must imagine all of this through a thick German accent, it was fucking weird even without the drugs) and that is the last thing I properly remember until I woke up to someone saying, in an impressed way, "Sie schlaft gut," as they transferred me from bed to bed.

I felt fine almost right away, in recovery. In fact, I went right back to feeling like a sick person poseur, because everyone else on the ward seemed legitimately hurty and dopey and I was like, "MAN I COULD REALLY USE A PEE," as I watched the IV drip into my arm and I struggled to remember how to ask for a loo but auf Deutsch. (For the record, it's 'Kann ich in's Klo gehen, bitte?' At least, that worked, eventually.) The nurses kept asking if I was in pain, if I felt sick, and I was like, "NO MOTHERFUCKERS I COULD RUN A RACE. CAN EVERYONE PLEASE NOTICE HOW MUCH MY LADYBITS ARE *NOT* BLEEDING YAYYYYY?"

So they let me go, after a nice gynecologist from emerg came up and told me the surgeon found and removed a polyp (this is a benign thing, I understand, and probably was causing all the trouble.) I was given some post-op directions, told to see a doctor at home, prescribed some iron pills, and then it was, "now get the fuck out of here". I spent the night in a hotel in Regensburg (that is where I was, it turns out) and caught up with the tour group in Prague the next day, still feeling a little see-through but oh-so-fucking-happy to be period-free. I wanted to say it to everyone: see how I'm *not* gushing blood? THAT IS THE BEST THING. I AM HAVING A D&C EVERY MONTH FROM NOW ON. SIGN ME THE FUCK UP.

I had a follow-up with my family doc this morning. She is the most laid-back lady in the world, so it went like, "well, you seem fine. are you fine? hmm, you could have an ultrasound. do you want an ultrasound? sure, let's do that." I am apparently normal, or normal for me, and now it's just wait-and-see to find out if the offending polyp had anything to do with my epic heavy periods as my body cycles around again. The German gynecologist was insistent that I should be on the pill but my Canadian doc is a bit of an earth-mother hippie type and would like to find out what my body thinks first, and I'm game if only because I'm curious.

And that is the story of how I survived my uterus trying to kill me in Germany. *curtsies*