After Cancer, My Doctors Assume Everything I Have Is Cancer

Jessica Bolz is a four-time cancer survivor after diagnoses of Hodgkin lymphoma and breast cancer. Catch up on Jessica's blogs here!

Recently I had two doctors scare the heck out of me. I had a very huge fibroid in my uterus and decided since in my 40 years of being a cancer survivor of several different diseases, I was looking for a minimalist approach to help relieve the symptoms of continual bleeding and pain as well as massive bloating by participating in a new type of ablation called the SONATA. Now I’ve been a researcher ever since my first diagnosis. I like to know what is happening and what the“big words” mean.

Surprisingly, I didn’t do that before going forward with this procedure. Maybe because I am so tired of my continual diagnoses and my having to look things up and talk endlessly to doctors. I’m not really sure why. I just knew I was supposedly with the best surgeon for the procedure, one who was labeled a “pioneer” in the field.

From the get-go, I wasn’t thrilled with her. She seemed to contradict herself constantly, but I read all her reviews. I talked with another doctor at my own home facility at Duke about how the surgeon had a 5-star rating, so how could she be anything but amazing? Except…She wasn’t.

The procedure itself was very simple. I was sedated and she stuck a hot prong into the fibroid and heated it so its blood supply would be cut off and thus the fibroid would essentially be eliminated. Initially, everything was fine.

The first month went by and I enjoyed almost no bleeding but then I started hemorrhaging and it wouldn’t stop. I went to the emergency room (ER), spoke to the surgeon and no one seemed to know what was happening to me.

I made an appointment to go back and see my surgeon and as always, I read my report from my ultrasound which showed that the fibroid as well as my uterus had grown!

Bleeding and scared as she walked in, I asked her why my fibroid had grown and why my uterus was bigger. Her answer was “I noticed that and I’m very concerned.” I thought to myself “Here we go again.”

She was going to claim that it may be the “C” word because it’s the easiest way to answer what’s going on and remove any blame from herself for what’s happening to me. I left her office in tears with my father but we both said it didn’t make sense. The fibroid was actually getting smaller before the procedure and then she enflamed it.

I went back home eager to speak with my Duke specialist to dispel what the surgeon had said, only to hear his support of her words “Fibroids don’t get bigger after an ablation! We have to think this is something more serious.”

Hmmm. Strange. I had read about women having embolizations, a similar procedure, and their stories of bleeding heavily and having their fibroid grow. I basically hung up on the Zoom call and thought both of these doctors had thrown me back in the cancer bin as the easy way out.

I scheduled a hysterectomy (surgical removal of the entire uterus) for the next month but in the meantime, I had my massive heart attack and the hysterectomy, of course, went on the back burner.

Just recently and nine months after my heart transplant, I was with friends, and I felt something in my stomach drop. It turned out my body expelled the fibroid; a rarity for the body to do. And guess what… I ran it over to the lab and the pathology came back benign.

I rarely want to go to the ER because as soon as they see my chart they immediately diagnose me with something horrific based on my past. I have to challenge my doctors to think outside the box. Instead of taking the easy way out, I want them to do their homework and look at other things it could be.

Too many of us, besides the real events, have to go through scare after scare from doctors or surgeons who just don’t understand how to look at a survivor’s body any other way. I urge anyone I counsel to get second and third opinions, but most of all, to do their own research. I was glad I got to go back to them with my own studies of other women who have benign events like mine so I could help myself from not living as a victim or in fear.

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