Today, I received my first visitor! So exciting.
A good friend stopped by, tasty goodies in hand. It was so nice to sit and chat and feel like a non-invalid for a while. (As she has an MD/PhD, it was even nicer to be completely uncensored in talking about my ex-fibroid.)
Interestingly, she reminded me that the Castellot Lab at Tufts University's Sackler School of Graduate Biomedical Sciences (where she got her PhD and I worked for 7 years--nice plug there) has a focus on uterine fibriods.
I never really processed this before now since I wasn't familiar with fibroids. The more scientific name for them may also have thrown me off: leiomyoma, which refers to any type of benign smooth muscle overgrowth, not just uterine fibroids.
Castellot's lab is researching how the use of a specific protein, CCN5, may help prevent or slow the growth of uterine fibroids (currently working in mice). This is interesting to me because women who have troublesome fibroids once (like me!) are likely to see a recurrence at some point.
My hope is that if or when I start growing more friends, they will either be non-bothersome or I will be at a point in my life where a non-surgical type of treatment will suffice. (For the record, many women have fibroids that never amount to anything, and never interfere with pregnancy, lifestlye, etc.)
All this talk of fibroids has caused my uterus to start quivering (literally). Not sure how I feel about this so, on that note, I'm going to get up and go walk around the house.
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