Dr. Patricia Sullivan Facebook ad: “My mother's sling took 4 surgeries. I said NO.”

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I have been a scrub nurse for 24 years, and I am going to say the thing nobody in a hospital will say out loud, not in the break room, not at the huddle, not to the woman you have scrubbed next to for a decade: I leak, and I have hidden it inside an operating room for six years. By the time you get to the part about the saline bottle you will understand why I am typing this at four in the morning with my jaw clenched. I have written this three times since Sunday and deleted it, and this time I am hitting post before I put my scrubs on. You want to know what the hiding looks like? It looks like competence. It looks like a second pad folded in before any long case, because I KNOW that in hour three it is going to go warm and my hands are in a sterile field. It looks like a woman who stopped laughing at work. Not laughing less, STOPPED, because a real laugh meant a leak every single time. Then two years ago in March it crossed a line I cannot uncross. Hour four of a colon resection, and I sneezed, one sneeze, the kind you do not even cover because your hands are gloved and holding a retractor. And I felt it go. ALL of it. I could not leave, because you do not break scrub in the middle of a bowel case for that, you would have to say WHY. So I stood there for fifty minutes and felt it soak through the pad, down the inside of my left leg, into my sock, into my shoe, and I passed instruments with a face like nothing was happening. Have you ever tried to hold a retractor steady while you can feel your own sock going wet? Here is the part I have never told anybody. When the case closed I picked up the open liter of saline off the back table and let it slip. On purpose. Down my own leg, the whole liter, right in front of the circulating nurse. "Oh for God's sake, look at me," I said, and she laughed and handed me a towel. And I walked out squelching in a shoe full of my own urine and let a woman I have worked beside for eleven years believe I was CLUMSY. I poured a LITER OF SALINE on myself so nobody would know. A grown woman with a nursing license and a mortgage did that, and then drove home and made dinner. In the locker room I cried on the bench with my fist in my mouth so it would not carry to the hall. I was 55, two kids, both over eight pounds, and I had told myself for years that this was the bill. But sitting in a puddle after 24 years of being the calmest person in any room, that was not a bill. That was my body making me a LIAR at work. I told Mike that night, to his back, while he loaded the dishwasher, because I could not say it to his face. "I'm wetting myself at work. In the OR. I can't stop it and it's getting worse." He set the plate down very carefully and asked what does the doctor say. Let me tell you what the doctor said. She said it was VERY COMMON. That was her phrase, she said it FOUR TIMES in one visit and I counted. Very common after children. Very common after menopause. Very common at your age, and here is a sheet for Kegels. I did the Kegels for eight months, three sets a day, in the car and the elevator, and I did not miss ONE day. And I still leaked. Then she gave me oxybutynin, the pill that is supposed to quiet the bladder down. Nobody warned me my mouth would go so dry I could not swallow a sandwich, or that I would get so backed up I cried on the toilet, or about the fog. THE FOG. I blanked on the name of a Kelly clamp. A Kelly. I have handed a THOUSAND of those. My charge nurse took me by the elbow and said, "Hon, you were somewhere else in there," and I went home and flushed the bottle. So back I went, and this time she was typing before I finished talking, and she slid a referral across the desk. A mid urethral sling, outpatient, back to work in two weeks, she said, like she was recommending a PILLOW. And here is where I got ugly, and I am not sorry. My mother had that sling in 2012. By 2015 the mesh had worked into her bladder wall, and she has had it revised THREE times since, and she still leaks. She is 78 and she hurts every day, and she wears a pad to church and to bed and to her own birthday. I put my hand flat on the referral and I said, "My mother has had FOUR surgeries on that exact thing and she still pees herself." "So do not say very common to me one more time, or I am going to stand up and pee on your floor and you can chart THAT as common." I said that to a physician, and I meant every word of it. She said I should take some time to think about it. I did not need time. I am NOT ending up on my mother's table. I decided in that chair that I would wear a DIAPER to retirement before I let anybody put a sling in me. So that is what I did. Pads, four or five a shift, and a gallon zip bag in my locker for the used ones so nobody would see. Do you understand what that is? I hand a surgeon the instrument that saves a woman's life standing in a wet pad with a bag of my own SHAME eleven feet away. Does that sound like somebody who is okay? Because I said I was okay every single day. Then in January something happened that did not come from a doctor. I was prepping a woman named Dolores for a gallbladder, sixty three and funny, and she said the thing that stopped me. She said she used to leak so bad she could not cough or bend for a dropped sock without an accident. "Six years in pads," she said, "and I'm not wearing one today. Feel free to check." My hands stopped over the line. "What do you mean, not today?" She looked at my face and asked what nobody in six years of appointments ever had. "Honey, when did yours start?" I told a patient the truth before I ever told a doctor, it got worse the year my periods stopped. "Mine too," she said. "Same year. That's not your babies, honey." And I stood there with tape in my hand and knew she was right. She said she had started taking a pumpkin seed oil, and I must have made a face, because she patted my arm. "No honey, not the plain one, the plain one did NOTHING for me, the one I take has saw palmetto in it too, and that's the one that worked." I nodded, I taped her line, I did my job. I thought saw palmetto is a PROSTATE thing, and that is the reason I wasted eight more weeks. I have handed instruments in prostate cases for twenty years, so I figured she got lucky on a man's supplement. So that night I sat at the kitchen table in damp scrub pants and started reading, journal stuff, not a blog. And what I found made me put my hand over my mouth, because Dolores was RIGHT, it was not the babies. The muscle that squeezes the bladder goes overactive in a lot of women right around when their periods quit, and that is why mine got WORSE the year I went through the change. I had spent eight months squeezing a floor that was never the problem, while the bladder itself sat up there clenching on its own, and not one Kegel was ever going to reach it. Six years. I blamed my body for SIX YEARS for something that happened TO it. So here is where I was smart and stupid at the same time. I bought the pure one, cold pressed pumpkin seed oil and nothing else, because I still thought Dolores' saw palmetto was noise. Week one, nothing. Week two, nothing. Week four I went from five pads to four on a ten hour shift and I got excited, and then I sat at four. Week six, four. Week eight, four. It hit a WALL on me, and I stood there with a bag of four used pads thinking, so this is as good as it gets, and the sling referral was still in my nightstand. I almost stopped. Are you at that week right now? Instead I went back to the part of what Dolores said that I had decided to ignore. Saw palmetto is not a prostate thing. Dolores had said it right to my face, that her own urologist was the one who told her to try it for the urgency and the night trips, and I let it go in one ear because I had a line to tape. My patient knew more about my bladder than I did. So I looked for what she actually took, both in one softgel, the cold pressed oil AND the saw palmetto extract, amounts printed on the label. The one built that way on purpose for women my age was Bloom & Bond, and I will tell you the truth, the front of the bottle is about HAIR, thinning hair after 50, and I almost closed the tab. I did not care about my hair that night. I cared about my sock. I ordered it at eleven on a Tuesday night and did not tell Mike, because if it did nothing I did not want to see his face. Here is what happened, and I am giving you the count because a count is the only thing I trust. Week one, honestly nothing. Same four pads, same bag. Week two, three pads on a twelve hour day, and one of them was barely damp, and I held it up to the stall light like an idiot. Week three was the kitchen. I sneezed over the sink, a real one, loud, and I froze with both hands on the counter waiting for the warmth. Nothing. I went to the bathroom and checked. DRY. Mike looked up from his phone and said what, and I said I sneezed, and he said okay, and I said, "Mike, I sneezed and NOTHING HAPPENED." And then I was crying into the dish towel and he held me and did not fully get it, and that was fine, because I got it. Week four I laughed in an OR. The anesthesiologist said something filthy about the Browns and I laughed from my stomach before I could catch it, and there was NO bill. Week six I walked into a seven hour spine case with nothing, regular underwear, the kind I wore at 40. Seven hours, and afterward I sat on the same bench where I had cried with my fist in my mouth, and I cried again, and I did not care who heard. At my follow up I put the bottle on her desk. She read the label, read something on her computer for a while, and closed the laptop. "Well. Let's take the surgical referral off the table." OFF THE TABLE. Her words. I called Mike from the parking lot and said no surgery, and he said thank God, twice. That was three months ago. Now here's the thing I need you to understand, because I know exactly who is reading this at four in the morning with a pad in her hand. Every month you wait you are training yourself SMALLER. How many laughs have you swallowed this year? You skip the road trip, you sit out the wedding dance, you tell yourself it is your pelvic floor when it is not. And one day a doctor slides a referral across a desk and you are so worn down you say yes to a SLING because you think it is the only door left. It is not the only door left. A 63 year old woman named Dolores told a nurse something the nurse's own doctor never did, and I am typing this without a pad on. Which brings me to the part I did not order it for. Three months in, my hairdresser had her fingers in my crown and said, "There's a whole crop of new growth back here." It turns out the front of the bottle was not lying, the same two things that quieted my bladder are what they built the whole product for. My bladder was just the door I walked in through. Are you still doing the Kegels? Are you still telling your husband it is fine? Do you have a bag in your locker too? Then go look at what I take, the page is right below this. Give it the ninety days they give you, because week eight on the WRONG bottle almost sent me to my mother's surgeon. I sneezed three times this morning, pollen, and nothing happened. Three. I am 57 and last month I danced at my nephew's wedding in a green dress with nothing under it but underwear. My mother's path ends in a fourth surgery. I got off it. Renee, scrub nurse, 24 years P.S. I threw the zip bag out of my locker in week six and I kept the referral, and every time I open that drawer I remember which one I chose. P.P.S. The circulating nurse I spilled the saline in front of is named Kim. I told her the truth last month, and she hugged me in the supply room and said she has a bag in her locker too.

Where the ad sends people

trybloomandbond.com

My mother's sling took 4 surgeries. I said NO.

Pumpkin seed oil with saw palmetto in one softgel, 90 days to find out.