Those Doctors

By no means will I ever be considered a perfectly "fit" person. I am overweight and have been since puberty. The doctors I have seen over the years write me off automatically as a lazy person who must become an anorexic vegetarian in order to become truly healthy. Truthfully, it was my doctors that made me feel like less of a person rather than those kids who teased me in school. I am not talking about one doctor, I am talking about the 23 different doctors I have seen for help since I was 13 years old. For 18 years of my life I went to every specialist I could for help with not only my weight, but for the strange pains I was experiencing all the time. On top of this pain I started to develop psoriasis at the age of 13. Even dermatologists wrote this ailment off as a condition of my weight.

By spring of 2004 I had sought help by three different specialists for testing about fertility. They all told me it I was fine and not getting pregnant because of my weight. We had been trying for 7 years to have a baby. I gave up. No one was going to give me a straight answer or proof that my weight was the cause of all my problems. There are people out there heavier than I who have kids, clear skin and I can factually tell you they eat a lot more junk then I ever did. As a teenager I started a diet that I still hold onto today. Light meals, little meat, lots of salad. I was never a sweet junkie. I don't sit down and devour a bag of chips while watching the news.

Everything came to a head in the summer of 2004. We moved to Nevada to help take care of my ailing grandparents. The emotional stress was building and I did my best but the pain got too much to handle and my skin made me feel like some strange sideshow freak. People I would meet at the grocery store actually pulled away appalled that I had the audacity to have flaky skin. By this time my psoriasis had taken over about 73% of my body. I started to think about suicide. Regardless of a wonderful loving husband, I saw no reason to live. I was determined only to be around to help my beautiful grandmother in the last years of her life.

One night in August I blacked out from the pain. I awoke writhing on the bed with tears rolling out of my eyes and screams erupting from my throat. My husband ran across the street to get our neighbor to help. Carol. Carol is an angel to me. Carol insisted that I get the next appointment with the gynecologist and insist on have a laparascopy done. Two days later I saw Dr Kolbalter. He brought up the possiblity of doing a laparascopy before I did! He tried an ultrasound and got strange results that he worried could be cancerous cysts on my ovaries. He then scheduled the laparascopy.

September 15th 2004. My husband drove me to the hospital, trying to calm me and himself along the way. I must tell you, I didn't care one way or another if I came out of the surgery dead or alive. I was out of hope and in so much pain that any sense of relief was a pipe dream. The technicians explained the procedure, I signed some papers, then I was wheeled away. I awoke groggy and in a bad mood. I was sore and kinda angry that I woke up at all. An appointment was scheduled with Dr Kobalter the next day. They released me that evening and my husband took me home. The next day while checking the small incisions made during the surgery, Dr Kobalter explained what they had found.

At the age of 12 I suffered an erupted appendix. It was bad. I almost died from the contamination this useless organ spread through my body. At the age of 16, I was gang raped by three large men who were very brutal. Punching me and damaging me inside and out. When Dr Kobalter got a look at the cause of my pain, he found over a pound of scar tissue had developed over my ovaries, fallopian tubes and attached to my uterus. This scar tissue was blocking the natural process of the female system. My menstrual cycles were always chaotic. For three years straight in my twenties I only had one period a year! Dr Kobalter removed most of the scar tissue, gave me a D&C and checked the small cysts on my ovaries. He found none to be cancerous. During this after surgery check-up he was upbeat and happy. He explained he was surprised at his findings and how minor they turned out to be. I was surprised that NO DOCTOR I had been to before ever thought to give me this same exploratory surgery. NONE! NOT ONE MORONIC SELF-CENTERED, I-AM-GOD! DOCTOR!!!

At the end of the check-up, Dr Kobalter told me two things. First, I should experience no more of the strange pains after I fully heal from the surgery. Second, He guaranteed that I would be pregnant before Christmas of that year. I thought he was a moron. I thought he was crazy. I held on to my concrete "no hope" thought processes.

My husband still held hope. Checking the ovulation calandar I used to keep, he insisted we try again. It was October 22, 2004. Just over a month after the surgery.