From: dbrown@tron.bwi.wec.com (Darryl Brown)
Subject: Questions about complications from Tubal Ligation
Organization: Westinghouse Electric Corporation, Baltimore MD.
Date: Mon, 21 Dec 1992 22:51:45 GMT

       My wife had a tubal ligation performed 6 years ago at the time
when my son was born.  A couple of months later she began to experience
menstrual periods that were completely out-of-sync between every 1-3
weeks, and averaging every other week.  After a few months of this, her
gynecologist recommended that she take a hormone shot that would
stop the bleeding for several months, and hopefully restore her
back to normal.  The shot had the expected effect of stopping her
menstruation for about 6 months, but once its effect wore off, the 1-3
week cycle began to repeat.  The next step was that the doctor had her go
and have a D&C performed to see if that would clear up the problem. 
Again, this worked for a few months, but the problem returned. 
Her doctor then gave her hormone pills to take, but they reacted so
adversely with her control of her diabetes (she is insulin-dependent),
that she had to stop taking them.  
       The gynecologist performed another D&C another year after the
first one, with the same results as before.  
       She ignored the problem for a while after that.  Finally, last
year, she decided that if she could try to get the doctor to reverse the
tubal ligation surgery, maybe the problem would go away.  This was
a hard decision to make, since we were not certain that our insurance
woud pick up the cost for the operation.  The doctor even tried to talk
her out of doing it the night before she was to go into surgery. 
       After the gynecologist had opened her up, and began to look
around, he found that she had two 2-3cm cysts in each of her ovaries,
one of which had ruptured.  He came out of the operating room to ask my
permission to do a hysterectomy.  My wife is a nurse, and based on her 
knowledge, she has an aversion to having anything removed from her,
unless it is absolutely has to be.  I discussed the alternatives and
I signed a release form for him to only do an oopherectomy.  When
he went back in, he found that the damage to the ovaries was not quite
as bad as he thought at first, so he removed the cysts and was able to
reverse the tubal on one of her tubes.
       Since having the surgery one year ago, my wife's menstrual cycles
have been back to normal.
       She has noticed that as she has been talking to several other women 
who have had hysterectomies done for abnormal bleeding, that they had had
tubal ligations done before their abnormal beleeding started.  She knows of
five women who this has  happened to, three of whom had ovarian cysts.

      Our questions are:
       1.  Are ovarian cysts and abnormal bleeding *common*
           complications involved with having a tubal ligation?
       2.  Has anyone heard of a tubal ligation reversal operation a cure
           for these complications?
       3.  What are the odds of the ovarian cysts returning?  Even more
           importantly, what are the chances if they return, that they may be
           malignant?
       4.  Is there a reliable method for detecting these cysts,
           without surgery? (i.e. ultrasound)


    Please e-mail any responses to me at brown@sky00.bwi.wec.com (note that
this is a different address than where I am posting the article from).  I
will post a summary of the responses I receive.
                                thanks in advance...
                                Darryl Brown
-- 
#  Darryl K. Brown  |  brown@sky00.tron.bwi.wec.com             #
#  Westinghouse ESG |                                           #
#  Baltimore, MD    |                                           #