Poor, Poor Ovaries

This post has been a long time in the making.

Back in October 2007, I went for an Executive Screening programme at a hospital which shall remain unnamed (you never know who's reading this), just to see how bad a shape my body was in given all the stress it was exposed to at work.

I didn't actually expect them to find anything serious, because I wasn't suffering from any symptoms other than tension headaches and mental burnout. But shit, a chance ultrasound discovered a cyst in my ovaries. Quite a big one, about 4cm in diameter

Some X-Rays and MRIs later, I was scheduled for a laproscopy to remove it. They made 3 little punctures in my tummy and demonstrated just how skilled you have to be to be a surgeon. Not to mention how strong a constitution you must have.

They took a video of the whole thing. But ... but ... I managed to get the video of some other patient to illustrate what happens during the operation. Yes. This is not mine. No. Nope.

So, here's some screen captures of the action. The video starts with them just having made a hole in the belly button and shoving a metal pipe through it so the camera can go through :


Then, another hole is being made by skewering something sharp throgh the right side of the belly. Observe how hard it is to poke through the skin. Argh :


Another metal pipe is shoved through the new hole, to let more implements slide through :

This cool clamp thingy come through the pipe and grabs at the gigantic ovary. You can see the normal-sized one on the right :

OMFG! The cystic ovary is bigger than the damned uterus (the pink, round thing dangling to the right like a testicle down there)!!

A healthy ovary looks like an ugly shrivelled white raisin - ala the small puckered thing on the right. Observe the frightening difference :

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA :

The surgeon uses this cool tool that can clamp things as well as BURN them. He burns a hole in the ovary containing the cyst and yellow puss stuff spews out :


He uses the other clamp to rip open the ovary skin, and more toxic yellow puss oozes out :

More ripping occurs :

The ovary is peeled open like a Mandarin orange. The red lump inside is the cyst, covered in a fleshy bleeding skin :
As the cyst is being pulled out, yellow puss SPURTS out like a fountain :

50% done now, just gotta fully pull apart that "orange" :

The cyst is now out and left to reside in the body cavity, which is now a pool of poisonous yellow puss:

The poor ovary is still bleeding, so the implement is used to cauterise the weeping wounds :


They stuff in a bag to contain the cyst and it's juices when they pop it. Because in case the cyst was cancerous, they can't afford to have any cancerous cells spilling all over the intestines :
Up, up and away. The cyst is deflated and a sample is taken out for a fast biopsy :

They pump in water to clean all the organs of the yellow gunk and blood that came out during the whole process. Meanwhile the biopsy is being done. If the biopsy shows the cyst is cancerous, the whole ovary has to come off !!!
The biopsy shows that the cyst is benign, so the surgeon proceeds to patch up the poor ravaged ovary with a needle and thread :

The thread is purple! My favourite colour! Coooooool :

In such a small space, accidents do happen. The needle stabs the uterus by accident :

After 3 knots, the ovary is left to its own devices to heal : The left ovary is now normal and raisin-like again!

The cyst is cut open, and to my disappointment, there are no teeth inside (which is normally what you find in a Dermoid cyst). Just a clump of hair that you'd find in your shower after not cleaning the drain out for a few months :

Yucky yucky.

Go get yourself checked-up with an ultrasound today! Don't wait for symptoms to show, because usually when Dermoid Cysts are discovered, it's when they get so big it twists the ovary (you're in a lot of pain) and you lose the ovary anyway.