Oncologist appointment

I met with the gyn oncologist yesterday. She agrees with the preliminary conclusion that I do not have cancer, which is fantastic. She is happy to do another scan in 3 months or so to check on the cyst, but unless I develop additional symptoms, she is not inclined to treat it with additional surgery. It's about the best outcome you can hope for when you head into an oncology waiting room.

However, as usual when doctors think they're delivering good news to me, I was a complete mess and spent a good chunk of time sobbing afterwards. Harry and I spent a bunch of time before this appointment talking about how one major source of anxiety for both of us is the lack of a plan going forward - we got this diagnosis of endometriosis and infertility in rather dramatic fashion, embarked on a traumatic IVF cycle and pregnancy right away, and our first year of parenthood has been punctuated by additional health crises like the one that had brought us to the oncologist's office. A huge amount of my unhappiness rests on the fact that I woke up from my surgery with an array of bad options to manage my endometriosis between now and menopause:
1. take the birth control pill continuously
2. take other hormones that would accomplish the same thing as the pill (probably Lupron Depot)
3. get pregnant as soon as possible through IVF, then breastfeed for an extended period of time
4. monitor me with routine transvaginal ultrasounds to see how quickly the endometriomas would recur to the point where I needed surgery again

Here's how I viewed those options:
1. feel generally terrible and pessimistic about life
2. feel generally terrible and pessimistic about life, with the likely addition of some unpleasant physical side effects
3. endure awful things happening to my body during IVF, pregnancy, and birth, plus I have to take care of an infant during the lowest time of my entire life, followed by the inevitable selection of options 1, 2, or another attempt at 3
4. live with anxiety between each uncomfortable scan, followed by the inevitable selection of options 1, 2, or 3 (plus or minus another surgery)

I was completely unprepared for the tidal wave of grief and anger that came over me after my diagnosis, as I have previously described. But what's amazing is that that grief and anger is as palpable today as it was two years ago, and I attribute that to the fact that I'm still at square one when managing the future of my body using the menu above... plus I'm grappling with the utterly terrible realization that the doctors and nurses who I thought would support me during this process are actually (to varying degrees, but still) indifferent to my suffering. Naively, I thought that one positive outcome of meeting with a gyn oncologist - whose practice does include patients with benign but complicated conditions including endometriosis - was that I might finally have found the person who was going to say to me "This is a very tough diagnosis, and we're sorry we don't have better news for you. But we are here to help you - please tell us what we can do." The doctor I saw was very friendly, but I suspect that when you spend your days telling women that they have cancer, it is completely baffling when the promising young patient in your office is visibly unhappy when you say she does not have cancer after all and she can proceed in her efforts to get pregnant.

I have to wrap this up because - no kidding - I have to go to the pharmacy to get the progesterone in oil shots that I swore I would never take. (Turns out that my doctor and I may have both had incomplete information when he told me in August that they would prescribe Crinone for a frozen embryo transfer cycle.) This is all I'm going to say: in case it wasn't obvious already, I am f*cking miserable. The last two years have been the most difficult of my life and I estimate I have another 20 years of the same before my body enters menopause. I am not going to survive that. I don't know how I can live one more second in this body, I don't know what I did to deserve this diagnosis, and I really don't know why no one wants to help me. If you resent me for saying this, well, the good news is that you couldn't possibly hate me more than I hate myself.