I am a thirty year old woman who had essure done when I was twenty eight years old. I had my two sons in my early twenties. With four miscarriages prior to conceiving my sons and multiple health issues with me along with them both being special needs, I had decided my family was complete. I told the doctor that I was considering sterilization. While, I was young for getting sterilized my doctor worked with me and understood that my sensitivity to hormones made me a good candidate for permanent sterilization. They convinced me that as a stay-at-home mom that the ESSURE procedure would be ideal to reduce recovery time. I opted to have the insertion done while awake with just xanax to help relax me during the procedure.
The procedure went fine except for a minor twitching of one fallopian tube during insertion. I had no immediate problems and within three months had my follow-up contrast study done and everything looked great, completely blocked. Yet, that was only the beginning. I started feeling off, and my health issues started coming more and more to the surface. I began bleeding more heavily and I could feel the coils, particularly during certain parts of my cycle. My periods became longer as well. Instead of my normal five to seven days, I started having heavy periods that would last two weeks. I didn’t immediately attribute any of these things to ESSURE because of the fact that I also have PCOS and other health issues.
Yet, the final straw came a year and a half after I had my insertion where I had a three-month period that doctors could do nothing to stop. My entire uterus felt like it wanted to crawl out of my body. Hoping to stop the bleeding, my doctors inserted a Mirena IUD in order to try and hormonally control the bleeding without increasing my clotting risks. However, that expelled within a week of insertion. My uterus was rejecting anything and everything and I was increasingly weak, sick, and just exhausted. Migraines were a constant companion. I still wasn’t sure that it was the ESSURE coils causing all this because of my other diagnoses.
I had a full laproscopic hysterectomy (without ovary removal) two weeks ago. Suddenly, all these symptoms are gone. Despite being in the middle of healing, I am feeling like I am thinking clearly for the first time in a year and a half. The color has returned to my cheeks. I don’t feel constantly depressed. I don’t have any of the complications that I attributed to my other health issues now that the coils are out of my body.
I am now convinced that ESSURE was the main cause of my health issues in the past year. My medical issues are exacerbated by bodily stress, so they should naturally be getting more exacerbated by surgery. Instead, with the removal of ESSURE I am immediately seeing an improvement in my health and overall outlook. I don’t emotionally regret my hysterectomy, but I do regret all this time feeling awful when I could have been having far more quality time with my sons because of this horrid medical device.