They told me to remove my uterus. I refused.

Remove your uterus; it’s the simplest solution.

My gynaecologist pronounced the verdict just months after I had my first miscarriage, hardly a year into my marriage. I remember sitting across from her with my arms wrapped around my abdomen, where the pain was the worst—it felt like someone had kicked me hard in the stomach.

I was diagnosed with submucosal fibroids at the age of 26. It is a non-cancerous tumour that grows in the muscle just beneath the inner lining of the uterus and is common in about 25 per cent of women between the ages of 18 and 45 across the world. Think of it this way: the uterus is like an onion, made up of several layers. Submucosal fibroids grow on the layer nearest to the centre of the uterus, where a baby would develop.

Irrespective of their position, fibroids cause heavy periods. During the first few days, particularly, the pain is so severe that it is impossible to move. At night, I lay paralysed in bed for hours, praying for an end to the misery. In the morning, painkillers—as many as four—helped me function, barely.

My periods have always been this painful. But why they have always been this way is something I found out on the first scan of my very first pregnancy, which was terminated a month before my second trimester ended.

Four months later, I was in the boxy clinic of my gynaecologist, where she told me the ‘only solution’ that exists for my condition. Removing the uterus will cure it, she said, almost as a matter of fact, as if the organ my body was built around was disposable.

Thus began a 10-year journey that took me from one doctor to another and ultimately to an alternative most women never knew about: a procedure that could treat what was wrong with me without taking my uterus. But reaching there meant going through two rough pregnancies.

During my second pregnancy, a majority........

© Dawn Prism