You’re attitude about the things going on in your life is disgusting. The beauty behind the concept of the blog is that you have every right to say what you feel, and I respect that. I’m not telling you to be any different, or to stop writing. I’m simply expressing how completely ridiculous I find you to be.

- Comment by Jeni — August 6, 2009 @ 3:14 am

Due to some unforeseen expenditures related to my surgery and recovery, plus a certain lack of art supplies, I have to put “Five O’Clock Abortion” up for sale. Not that I wasn’t going to sell it anyway, I just hadn’t planned on doing it so soon.

Anyway, my main concern with this piece is how to hang it, which I’ve decided I’m going to leave up to the buyer. The wood is slightly too thin to put nails in for a saw-tooth hanger, but I’ll include one when I ship it anyway because you could easily use Crazy Glue to attach the saw-tooth hanger and hang it that way. Again though, I’m going to leave the decision to do that up to the buyer because another hanging option would be to frame it and that would be harder to do with a hanger on the back of it. Another option might be to drill a hole in each top corner and hang it with ribbon, but I don’t have a  working drill (that’s an item on my list of things to buy once I start selling more paintings again because ours died).

“Five O’Clock Abortion”
12×12 inch mixed media on wood
$350 US, including shipping — PayPal Only

For more photos, click here.
Please note that the actual painting is a bit darker than it appears in the photos.

- 5 incisions (there’s usually only 2, although one time I had 4)

- They damaged my bladder during the procedure and had to fix it.

- What was supposed to be a 2 hour surgery ended up being 4 because the endo was much worse than anticipated.

- It was raining when they wheeled me out to the car, so I didn’t think anything of the wetness on my right side until we got home and realized it was watery blood literally gushing out of one of the incisions. Got it under control, rebandaged, slept for a few hours on the couch on my left side.

- Woke up to more gushing. Much more.

- Called the Toronto hospital, they transferred us to 2 different departments and then hung up on us.

- Called Telehealth Ontario instead, they said to go to the closest ER.

- Drove 25 mins to the hospital as I’m holding a giant wad of toilet paper over my incision, which was soaked through and dripping with watery blood by the time we got there. They took blood, watched me gush for a while, gave me an ultrasound and determined I wasn’t bleeding internally and rebandaged most of my incisions (which had gotten wet and were falling off) and “pressure bandaged” the gushy one. Wanted to keep me overnight but I said no, on the condition that I’d come back tomorrow to be reassessed.

- Just woke up now to take more drugs (they gave me oxycodone x 30 tabs & mega-Naproxen x 14) and my bandage is soaked through with gushy fluid, but because of the dressing I can just see it’s soaked, it’s not actually wet to the touch.

- I’m wearing 3 different hospital bands from 2 different hospitals and IN A WORLD OF FUCKING PAIN that has me waking up every 2 hours.

- Soooooooooooooo thirsty either from losing fluid, the anesthetic, the drugs or I don’t even know what but being ultra-thirsty with a damaged bladder and swollen abdomen when you can barely walk is NOT FUN.

And I think that’s pretty much it.

THANK GOD the kids are up north at my dad & step-mom’s. I’ve never been so grateful in my life.

So tomorrow’s surgery day. Since people keep asking, I’ll go over it again…briefly:

• I have “extensive” endometriosis, which has been a problem since I was about 11.
• I had my first surgery for it, called a laparoscopy, when I was 16.
• I had my last surgery for it in March of this year (they just went in to see how bad it had gotten since my last surgery in 2001).
• Tomorrow’s surgery is different than the previous 4 in that they’ll be using a laser (as opposed to cauterization) to zap the endometrial adhesions and this should enable them to obliterate more of the disease and give me a longer period of being pain-free-ish.
• Tomorrow’s surgery should give me 3-4 years of being more or less pain-free.
• There is no cure for endometriosis. After this surgery I will likely be put on the birth control pill non-stop for a year without any periods to (theoretically) starve the disease of the hormones that feed it and cause it to grow. This, however, is a pipe dream as the pill puts your body into a temporary state of pseudo-pregnancy and neither time I actually was pregnant did the disease remain dormant like it’s supposed to. Plus, I’ve done the whole pill-non-stop-thing before and it didn’t do me any good, aside from not having any periods for a year that would normally cause me pain. The truth of the matter is, the disease will likely begin growing back within one month from now but won’t cause me any pain (or little pain) for a few years.
• The most commonly asked question of me is “why don’t you just have a hysterectomy?” and the short answer is that a hysterectomy isn’t a cure. There is an 85% chance that even after full hysterectomy the disease will begin to grow again and just affect other areas in the pelvic cavity. The long answer includes that, of course, but throw in the fact that menopause is gradual for a reason and happens at the age it does for a reason and the risks outweigh the 15% chance of benefit. There are drugs, most notably Lupron, that cause pseudo-menopause and act similarly to the birth control pill, but in the opposite direction, but it is my opinion that these drugs are evil, don’t work and I do not want them in my body.

So that’s pretty much the gist. I hope I don’t have to explain it again. In fact, I don’t think I will, I’ll just let people search the damn category.

Anyway, tomorrow we have to leave the house at 5am to be in Toronto for 7am, my surgery is for 9am and will be over at 11am. Not sure how long recovery takes, but after that I get to go home. The kids are up north at my dad & step-mom’s and I’m going to be in a world of uterine pain for at least 4 or 5 days, bellybutton area pain for about 2 weeks. (Which isn’t too bad, honestly, I just won’t be doing jumping jacks during that period of time.)

I’m very curious to see what kind of drugs they’ll give me. In my experience, painkiller distribution in Canada is a lot different than in the US. A American friend of mine had her wisdom teeth out a couple of days ago and her oral surgeon gave her oxycodone (I believe). That would never happen here. They give us Tylenol 3 (30mg codeine + 300 mg acetaminophen) for pretty much everything and that’s all I’ve ever gotten for any of my surgeries. The only Canadian person I’ve ever personally known who has gotten anything stronger was my grampa Freddie when he was dying of cancer. They gave him percocet. However! Tomorrow’s doctor is a Toronto doctor and does these surgeries boom boom boom all day, every day and may be the type to prescribe something more…fun. We’ll see. (But I’ll still wager I’ll get Tylenol 3 x 30 measly tablets.)

Since I’ll be couch-ridden for the next week, I won’t be able to work on my paintings, so I wanted to give a little update on that. “Sparkle” and “Shine” are finished but I haven’t had a chance to photograph them properly yet so I can’t show you the finished product, but “Shimmer” is mid-process so I thought I’d show her off:

For whatever reason, paisley is like, my default mermaid tail pattern. Her hair is actually really awesome, I mixed champagne gold with a metallic white for the perfect colour of sun-kisses tresses, her boobies will be jeweled and once I’m able to sit at my desk again, I’ll start the process of crackling her tail to make it look scaly.

On a whim, I created this girl who doesn’t even have a background yet and who I’m just calling “Devil Girl” for now.

The pic doesn’t even come close to doing her dress and horns justice. What I did was used the glitter paint almost like a paste and then put her somewhere safe overnight to dry, out of reach of dogs, kids and dust and that was the result. She’s going to look amazing once she’s ready for a coat or 3 of ultra glossy varnish.

So that’s life right now. I hope I don’t die tomorrow. Now I’m gonna go bug my neighbours.

Lori-AnneCrittenden.com
A Simpler Time Facebook group
(updated more often than her site)