So today I ended up with access to medical records when I joined a portal at my old doctors office.
I read a sanitized version of my second iud insertion after the first one fell into my uterus. I posted a pic of the description in images.
What really happened. My first iud insertion was maybe ten minutes long. But they were a devastating ten minutes.
For the second go round I took pointless Tylenol before the retrieval/insertion procedure. First I hopped in the stirrups and subjected my poor lady parts to the speculum, which today was the least of my worries. My doctor grabbed the strings with these toothed forceps and yanked the iud out of my uterus through my cervix. And then showed it to me with strings of bloody mucus on it. I mean. There’s really no words. I literally can’t even.
Then the real hellscape began. She clamped my cervix with a tenaculum, stuck a rod in there 8 centimeters deep, and tried to insert the iud. It wouldn’t go. Ok. Let’s stop here. Why the hell is that done to women every single day with no concept on the doctor’s part of how that actually feels? They tell you it’s a pinch and a cramp. You just read that. Does that sound like a pinch and a cramp?
So she tried to get it in there again. By this point I was writhing and crying in pain. She couldn’t get it to sit right so she pulled it out and tried again and I heard her send the nurse out for the cervical dilators. I could not form words other than swearing through the crying, but I can tell you right now there was no way in hell they were going to stick even one of those in me. By this time my legs were tensed up and almost together and my doctor told me to relax. She shoved it in there one more time and just as I was about to tell her to stop, she got it in. The nurse came in with the box of things I wanted to kick out of her hand and instead helped my doctor haul all of that shrapnel out of me. Then she said some words,but I don’t know what they were because I was in a full on panic. They pulled a sheet over me and sent my husband in. He looked at me and saw I was crying and white as a sheet and said what the hell happened to you.
So. I eventually got dressed and he went to pull the truck around and I walked across the hall to my doctor’s schedulers office to get a date to check the strings. She looked up at me and got up from her desk because I was weaving back and forth in her doorway. She grabbed my arm and walked me to the car and said she was going to have my nurse written up for letting that happen to me.
The patient tolerated the procedure well.
Now. I know some women don’t have a big problem with iud placement. But if anyone knows anything about women, you know we are not all alike. That was traumatic. And I would say maybe I can’t tolerate pain. But I was a gymnast and I fell off the balance beam and the bars. I have 7 tattoos, one of which is on my inner thigh. I was in labor for 18 hours before the c-section came along. I have migraines. None of that. Not even the contractions. None of it even comes close to having metal things clamped on, poked in, and shoved through my cervix.
Made a lil promise to myself. No more cervical intrusions without sedation.