The Silent Grief of Medical Trauma: What No One Told Me After Surgery

I never imagined I’d lose an ovary in my 20s. I remember staring at the hospital ceiling scared of anestesia, telling them “ no please just call my mom and dad, I dont want to do this anymore” then the anestiologist telling me “okay, just tell me where was your favorite place you’ve ever been?” before I could answer I was knocked out from the anestesia. After my surgery, I woke up numb, trying to process what had just happened to my body. Everyone around me said, “You’ll be fine.” But fine wasn’t what I felt — I felt broken, confused, and alone.

I felt so disconnected from my body and mind. I was physically and mentally trying to process the loss of my ovary due to having such a big ovarian cyst that I had no choice but to take out the cyst along with my ovary since I had lost blood flow to the ovary, it was no longer working. When the surgery was over, everyone around me told me to rest, heal, and to move on but thats easier said for someone that doesnt know what type of pain I was going though. No one tells you how to feel safe in a body that suddenly feels unfamiliar. I remember looking at my scar and just wondering how something invisible to everyone else could change everything inside me. It felt more than a loss of just an ovary.

My physical pain of the actual surgery had faded faster than the emotional one. There was grief I didn’t even know how to name — grief for the part of me I’d lost, for the version of myself that would never come back. I was angry at my body for betraying me, and guilty for even being angry at all.

The Loneliness …

No one really prepares you for the silence that follows medical trauma — the kind where you look fine on the outside, but inside you’re unraveling. I went through days of pretending I was okay, forcing smiles when talking to family and friends while my heart was still in recovery. It’s hard to explain that kind of pain when even you don’t fully understand it yourself or when you cant explain what you even feel to others. Its like nobody will ever understand the depth of it until someone is put in that position. Its hard to explain…

There were days when I avoided mirrors, and nights when I cried without even knowing why. The trauma wasn’t only physical — it was emotional, hormonal, invisible. People told me to “stay positive,” to “be grateful.” And while I understood what they meant, it felt like they were skipping over the part where I was allowed to hurt.

Eventually, I stopped trying to be “strong” and started trying to be honest. I began to write, to cry when I needed to, to talk about what I had been through without minimizing it. Slowly, I realized that healing wasn’t about getting back to who I was — it was about becoming someone new, someone gentler with herself. Healing wasn’t linear. Some days I felt strong and ready to move forward. Other days I was exhausted by my own thoughts. I started taking walks, writing and talking about what I had gone through — and that’s when I realized how many women have silently carried this same pain.

The surgeries, the cysts, the fertility fears, the scars we cover — they’re all parts of a story that’s rarely told out loud.

I learned to give myself grace. I began to see that healing didn’t mean pretending the trauma never happened — it meant learning to live gently with it. I stopped blaming my body and started thanking it for surviving. It had done the best it could and so did I.

To Any Woman Reading This

If you’ve been through something similar — whether it’s losing an ovary, facing surgery, or simply feeling betrayed by your own body — please know this: you are not alone. You are not less of a woman. You are not broken. Your worth has never depended on what your body can or can’t do. It lives in your strength, in your softness, in your ability to keep showing up even when no one sees what you’re carrying.

Healing doesn’t happen overnight, but it happens — in the quiet moments when you start to forgive yourself, when you breathe without fear, when you finally look at your reflection and see someone who survived something she never thought she could.

You are whole. You are still here. And that’s everything.