How to Mentally Prepare for a Hysterectomy

What kind of psychological preparation can you do before a hysterectomy?

As a fertility counselor and reproductive health psychologist, I help people with the ups and downs of fertility treatment, but some of my patients are individuals who will be seeking hysterectomies for medical reasons prior to family building.

Feeling fear before a hysterectomy

One of the experiences you can expect psychologically to happen if you move forward with a hysterectomy, is a lot of fear leading up to it.

For many of my patients, it is fear of regret. They wonder, “will I or did I make the wrong decision?”

Grief and loss before and after a hysterectomy

Outside of fear, you will have to prepare yourself psychologically to experience grief and loss.

Grief and loss that you've had to go through this process.

Grief and loss of potentially no longer being able to carry a child if your uterus is removed.

Grief and loss of not being able to conceive if you have your uterus and ovaries removed.

This may be the end of your family building journey, unless you can move forward to use a gestational carrier or surrogate, whether that's someone, you know, or someone you don’t.

Addressing genetic loss

If your ovaries are removed and you do not have the resources to retrieve your eggs from your ovaries, you can also experience genetic loss.

Genetic loss is wrapped in this type of hysterectomy because for many people, if they do want a family build with their own genetics.

Feelings of anger before and after your procedure

Last but not least is anger.

It's not fair.

It's not fair that you were up against such a difficult medical condition. It usually takes so much work to advocate to even get a hysterectomy.

Even if you are able to get a hysterectomy, there's still a lot of anger that you may try to process through because of the difficult situation you were put in. You might not necessarily have wanted to have a hysterectomy, but chose to for medical reasons, because you are or were under so much pain and discomfort that it was impacting your ability to live.

How you can address these emotions before and after your hysterectomy

One of the ways I like to address these emotions with my patients is by having them fill out a Quality of Life Measurement. It’s something physical they can reflect on whenever they feel they’re struggling with this enormous decision they’ve had to make.

What is a Quality of Life Measurement

It's really hard to remember the pain. Our bodies are built to forget physical pain.

In order to counteract that fear of regret, the grief and anger of going through a hysterectomy, documenting why you had to make this decision helps you bring yourself back to the present, back to when you had to advocate for yourself. A Quality of Life Measurement would capture that time for you and you could reflect on that in the future.

If you want a copy of a Quality of Life Measurement, send me an email and I’ll give you a copy.

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