Woman Details Having Dramatic Surgery at 23 Years Old After Symptoms 'So Severe' She Almost Didn't Graduate College (Exclusive)

One young woman is sharing her experience having a hysterectomy at a young age.

For Caroline Dillon, a registered nurse, having a hysterectomy wasn’t her first choice, but after pursuing multiple other methods of treatment for her endometriosis and adenomyosis, surgically removing her uterus felt like “the only option” left for her.

“We'd done the excision surgery before, but my symptoms were so severe that I barely graduated from college,” Dillon, 23, shares exclusively with PEOPLE. “I very nearly had to drop out on multiple occasions. I was in my bed all day every day if I wasn't at clinical. And it just was not a sustainable way for me to live.”

Before deciding to get the hysterectomy, she had two different surgeries to diagnose and treat her endometriosis and adenomyosis. When the symptoms returned after the first surgery, she sought out a new doctor and was even put in “medically induced menopause” for seven months when she was only 18 in an effort to alleviate some of her symptoms.

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“I was throwing up constantly. I was having bladder and bowel dysfunction, pelvic floor dysfunction, and I know my body well enough to know that things were only gonna get worse,” Dillon shares.

In January 2024, Dillon requested to her surgeon that she receive a hysterectomy. She admits that it wasn’t something she wanted to go through, and found undergoing the procedure at only 23 an isolating experience.

“I didn't feel like I had anybody that I could talk to about it,” she shares. “Everyone that I knew that had had a hysterectomy prior was several decades older than me, and they had it after they were done having kids. And it was like more of a choice where mine was not really a choice.”

But as a person with other disabilities she says are exacerbated by the symptoms of her endometriosis and adenomyosis, she went through with the procedure and has been sharing her experience on TikTok. Her most popular video about the surgery, detailing seven things she wished she’d known beforehand, now has 3.6 million views and more than 500,000 likes.

Dillon has been making content online for some time now, sharing her experiences as a nurse with multiple chronic illnesses and disabilities, though her videos about her hysterectomy have been her most-seen to date. Through her platform, she’s been vulnerable with her viewers, opening up about what life was like before and after the surgery.

“It constantly felt like I had a bowling ball sitting in my pelvis. It was hard to sit, it was hard to lay down, I couldn't wear pants sometimes. I had to catheterize myself,” Dillon details. “And I have no issues with that now and I don't have that bowling ball sitting in me constantly and I'm not throwing up as much. It has been life-changing, I would say definitely one of the best decisions I've ever made.”

Dillon is still healing from the surgery, which she had done in late November, and she’s expected to need at least 12 weeks to fully recover. Though she admits that the surgery has addressed the issues she’d hoped it would, having a hysterectomy has still put her through a period of grieving — especially as she comes to terms with the knowledge she won’t be able to have children.

“I wanted to have a baby. I did not want to have this done,” she says. “Grieving a child that you never even had and never will have is just — it's been awful. And nobody in my life really understands what that's like.”

“All of 2024 for me was spent preparing for this surgery and I went through all of the stages of grief. I felt like my choice had been taken away and that if I wanted to live any sort of life, I had to have this done,” she continues “A lot of people, even people who want the hysterectomy, it's very common for there to be a period of time around like two weeks post-op where people feel a little sad."

“There's just a lot of big feelings that come with a big surgery and even if you don't want kids, the permanence of taking that option [away] forever is  a lot. It's a really big thing to go through and there's a huge emotional component that I don't think is really talked about.”

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In between processing this grief and healing, Dillon reiterates that she feels “very lucky” to have a surgeon who supported her decision.

“I'm glad people are talking about it because it needs to be talked about,” she says. “It has needed to be talked about for a long time. And I feel very, very lucky that my surgeon is who he is and I didn't have to fight him for this, and that I got it done in a state that didn't have restrictions on that, and I was able to get that done before the new administration comes in.”

Though Dillon has had to turn off the comments on her viral video, she’s continued to make content about her surgery, hoping the conversation continues to reach others in similar situations to help them feel less alone.

“I think that's the thing with disability and chronic illness: we all feel so isolated,” she says. “It just feels very isolating and it's hard to start the conversation about disability [and] about the struggles because we're so constantly invalidated and it just sucks. But once the conversation is started, people will talk."

Read the original article on People