Before Ben and I got married, I told him honestly that I may not be able to have children. After self-diagnosing my period-related problems as endometriosis, I knew that it may affect my ability to conceive. I didn’t know any of this for sure, of course. Nevertheless, if Ben really wanted to be a dad, I felt it was important to warn him that I may not be able to have children. As it was, he was defying his parents’ wishes by choosing a black foreigner to marry in the first place. Choosing one who might not be able to have children could create a lot of family conflict as well. I wanted him to be very clear what he was getting himself into.
Even though I thought we had had all the important conversations before we got married, it appears that we didn’t have one. Shortly after we got married, I asked Ben if he would consider adoption. He mentioned that it isn’t something he would want to do. If we cannot naturally have children on our own, then we just, you know, don’t have children. He was concerned he wouldn’t be able to love a child that was not his the same way.
I was very surprised by this. You see, I was there when my niece was born. I was staying at my brother’s that faithful night at 15-years-old when my sister-in-law’s water broke, and my brother took the two of us to the hospital. Tiana did not end up being born until the afternoon, but somehow no one had the thought to kick me out of the room when Lisa was giving birth. So, I was quite literally there for the whole thing. The placenta was a sight to see, but any “Ew” factor was significantly overshadowed by the light of a new life being brought into the world.
I had never seen anything so beautiful in my life. I to this day have not felt anything like it. In that moment, I knew I very much wanted to be a mother. So, even if I couldn’t have children with my DNA, I always planned to be a mother. In fact, I used to have this rather “high-minded” opinion on the topic.
It’s true. I am curious about what a Ben and Maxi baby would look like. I also want us to make blood-linked grandchildren for Ben’s parents. I know this will be important to them, and I feel more pressure to do this since Ben’s marrying me was already an unconventional choice. Moreover, Ben wants his own children and questions whether he could be a good dad to children he did not give life to.I also know that adoption is not so easy, and given the unknown circumstances of how this child came into the world, it can feel like a gamble. However, life is a gamble; nothing is for certain, and at the end of the day, there are so many children who do not have parents. I’m of the opinion that people with wealth should adopt children who don’t have wealth. People who are not wealthy should be given the education necessary to learn about family planning to avoid having children they do not want or are unable to support. We need to control the population better and take care of what we already have in the world, instead of spending thousands of dollars trying to make children come out of our own bellies.
In other words, I thought Ben and I should simply go for adoption. If we end up, by chance, having our own children, great! If not, when we were both ready (i.e., both finished with school and in a comfortable financial situation) we could start the process of adoption.
However, at 26-years-old, only about one year into our marriage, I wanted to have my own children with Ben. I do not know what caused the sudden change, and I was wondering if it was just my hormones taking over. Was this the feeling of the ticking clock? Was this just the surge in hormones before ovulation?
Ben and I would spend the next year talking about this and what we really wanted. I think one of my fears was that my body was saying, “Listen, make a baby now. You may not be able to after this. You want to be a mom? Do it now.” However, Ben was, when faced with idea of soon being a dad, unsure he was quite ready. I stood on the side of, “babies take some time to make, and we don’t know how long it will take for me to get pregnant.” Ben’s thought was, and “What if you get pregnant right away?” He’s always been the optimist in our relationship.
In the meantime, I was still having heavy and painful periods. However, they came regularly. They never lasted longer than 6 days. For the most part, they seemed within the normal range of awful and inconvenient. The new problem was that I started having pain during ovulation as well. Sometimes during ovulation, I could barely walk. I would sit in a chair and not be able to stand back up. I would walk down the hall lopsided and holding my lower back. I would sneeze and find myself bent over on the floor from the pain. For me, the pain was primarily on the right side.
It was being in pain for two weeks, instead of just one week, that drove me back to a doctor. However, I figured doctors of Western medicine would prescribe more birth control pills. So, I decided to try Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) instead. Ben used to work at a pretty good TCM clinic in Shanghai. They had a gynecologist-focused TCM doctor that was reported to be one of the best in the city. I went to see her, and we talked about my symptoms and she ordered an ultrasound.
I have had many ultrasounds. None of them were like this. For an ultrasound, you need to have urine in your bladder. That was easy for me. All of my life, I have had difficulties controlling my bladder. I wet the bed until I was 11-years-old, the same year my cycle started. You can imagine that sleepovers were a nightmare for me as a kid. It meant I would stay awake all night for fear I would wet the bed while at a friend’s home. Or in the case of my one and only camping trip with the girl scouts, I wore one of those incontinence diapers they have for adults.
So, an ultrasound is usually torture for me as the sonographer moves the wand around seemingly to test how much pressure she can put on my bladder before I accidentally leak, which was happening a lot more recently. Another reason I went to the TCM clinic was not only to see this famed TCM gynecologist, it was also to see if the acupuncture doctor could help me with my increasingly concerning lack of control over my bladder. At this point, I’ve just turned 27. I thought if my bladder is like this at 27, what would it be like at 70? Actually, forget that far along, what would it be like in the next 5 years?
Anyway, this ultrasound was taking a long time, and the doctor’s facial expression was not encouraging. Finally, she said I could use the bathroom, but that I should come back. So, I went to relieve my bladder, and I came back, and she continued the ultrasound. She even had me turn over on my stomach and moved the wand around on my back. She looked even more concerned. “Did you pee everything out,” she asked. I said that I had. I couldn’t do anything else; I had barely made it to the bathroom to begin with. She said, “No, there is still pee in your bladder.” Oh? Really? Is that why I have to go so often? I’m not actually getting everything out when I go?
The ultrasound goes on a while longer yet. It was by far the longest ultrasound I had ever had in my life. The doctor looked visibly concerned, even upset. She said to go back to the waiting room until a doctor called me. I spoke to the TCM doctor. She mentioned that it would be difficult for me to get pregnant, something she knew Ben and I wanted to do in the near future. She gave me some medicine to take for one week. I was a foreigner. She was concerned I couldn’t stand the bitterness of the medicine, so just gave me a week to start.
I then saw the acupuncture doctor who looked very concerned as well. She decided to focus all her energy on getting my bladder back in shape. She even taped a small needle-type thing on my ears. She told me to press this a few times a day. It should help me control my bladder. I got a copy of the ultrasound which had my problems listed.
I immediately sent this to my US doctor friends for a second opinion. Neither of them are gynecologists, but Ron asked one of his colleagues to look at the results. Here’s the quick English translation of the ultrasound results I sent them:
Literal translation: uterus muscle disease (possible). So, this might be adenomyosis? This is just a possibility.
Literal translation: pelvic cavity has a little fluid. My understanding is that there shouldn’t be fluid in the pelvic cavity, which means I might have an infection.
Literal translation: wall of bladder coarse. They said that this means that I have been having a series of infections in my bladder. They said the wall is very rough. (I normally have an overactive bladder. I use the bathroom on average 14 – 17 times a day)
Literal translation: Both kidneys urine salt crystallization. They said that I have salts building up both kidneys, and this could lead to kidney stones.
From the English translation, you can see how I interpreted 可能(possible) in English. “This is just a possibility.” The year before being given a post-operative, 95% confidence diagnosis of adenomyosis, the doctor who did the ultrasound had identified it. You see the only way to be certain that a woman has adenomyosis is to examine the tissue of her uterus after a hysterectomy. So, maybe when the doctor put 可能, she just meant, “Of course, I can’t say with 100% certainty without a hysterectomy and further analysis that you have adenomyosis, but I’d say that you have adenomyosis.”
I don’t know why I didn’t pay it too much attention to it at that time. Perhaps it was because adenomyosis is so frequently confused with endometriosis, I may have been like, “Yeah, I know I have endometriosis already.” It may have been my misinterpretation of how likely 可能is. It may have been that adenomyosis was so much of a scarier prognosis to me (I will explain more why in a later post) that I chose to be optimistic and not stress about it. I had enough to worry about with my bladder. I had downloaded an app to keep track of how often I was going to the bathroom a day. As you can see from above, it’s sometimes more than twice the norm.
Ron’s colleague did get back to me about the test’s results saying that 1) I probably had endometriosis, 2) if I got pregnant, it would get better, and 3) if I didn’t want kids now, she could give me some birth control pills. I’m not sure where this myth of getting pregnant helping with endometriosis or adenomyosis comes from. I’m not sure if it’s true. Of course, the greater irony is that it’s very difficult for women with these uterine disorders to get pregnant in the first place, so…
Here’s what I did after this ultrasound. I went to the TCM clinic every Saturday for the next 3 – 4 months. I took my medicine once in the morning, and once at night. I had acupuncture on a weekly basis. I took (waaaay too much) antibiotics for my bladder problems, and of course, I drank more water. I also started taking a taxi to work every day to change my 50-minute commute to a 20-minute one. It wasn’t ideal. I did not like taking a taxi every day, but it was better than the stress of wondering if I would be able to make it to work without embarrassing myself.
I reached a breaking point when one morning after the first 35-minute leg to work, I got off the bus and found a bush to relieve myself. I simply could not make it the additional 15 minutes to work before going to the bathroom. The whole time I prayed that someone wouldn’t come from out of nowhere and see the black foreigner peeing by the bush. I can only imagine how that would reinforce stereotypes of black foreigners, not to mention the embarrassment.
So, I took taxis and had some of the most colorful conversations that I will share under Intercultural Encounters.
**The featured image is of me and my parents who came to visit China during the time discussed in this blog for our Chinese wedding. Ben and I said “I do” three times: once for official purposes, once for my family in the US, and this time for his family in China.
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