09/05/2026
Two years of my stomach. Post-op day one, day 21, one year out, and today.
Nobody prepares you for what a hysterectomy does to you after the surgery is over.
The recovery I planned for was the first six weeks. Nobody mentioned the two years.
I had put on 15 pounds of muscle before the surgery, so the weight came off fast at first and I thought Iād gotten off easy.
Then came internal pain nobody warned me about, and I couldnāt get back to real lifting for five months.
The problem was I kept looking for what Iād done wrong.
Between month seven and month ten I gained 22 pounds while training and tracking my macros, and there was no explanation for it. I went looking for one anyway, because thatās what women do... we assume itās us.
It wasnāt me. It was a body reorganizing itself after losing an entire organ system, on a timeline nobody handed me.
So I stopped fighting it and started supporting it.
Around month twelve the weight finally began coming back down, and then I fell down a flight of stairs in January and fractured my spine three months later from the damage that fall left behind.
I kept eating enough. I kept lifting what I could. I only just got back to real leg work.
Bottom right is today. Down about 13 pounds and, more importantly, I feel like myself again.
Iām starting HRT soon, which has been its own fight, because most medical guidance is still built on menās numbers and Iāve had to go outside the system to get help. Two years in November.
Itās a roller coaster, Diva, and Iām telling you the whole thing because somebody should have told me.
If youāre somewhere in the middle of this and convinced youāre doing it wrong... youāre not. It just takes a lot longer than anyone says out loud.
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