In 2014, not long after my son was born, I sat in my doctor's office and asked to have my tubes tied. I was done having kids, and I wanted something permanent.
He suggested something newer instead. Essure was a permanent birth control device: two small coils placed inside the fallopian tubes, where they cause scar tissue to build up until the tubes are blocked off completely. It was explained to me as an in-office procedure. No surgery, no downtime. That sounded a lot better than a tubal ligation, so I said yes.
Within a week I had pain in my pelvis. It got worse fast, to the point of being unbearable, and it woke up an old back injury on the way. I went back to my doctor to talk about getting the coils out, and in 2015 we settled on removing my fallopian tubes, coils and all. That was my first surgery. Little did I know that taking the tubes out doesn't always fix the problem.
Here is what I've learned about the device since, and none of this part is my story, so it comes with sources. Each insert is two coils: an outer coil of nickel-titanium, and an inner coil of stainless steel wound with PET fibres, the polyester that makes the tube scar over. Those fibres grow into the tube wall, which is the whole point of the device and also why getting it out is hard. The outer coil goes brittle over time and can break when it's pulled, and small pieces are easy to lose. Surgeons who've written this up say the only way to be sure nothing tears is a hysterectomy, or taking the tube together with a wedge of the uterus where it joins (van Gastel and colleagues, 2020). There are published cases of women still carrying fragments after their tubes were removed (Pepin and Einarsson, 2019). The coils can also move out of place on their own: of the 73,678 Essure reports the FDA had received by the end of 2024, 6,033 mentioned migration, 9,838 a perforation, and 10,493 a device fragment left in the patient (FDA, updated March 2025).
And removal doesn't always end it. A 2023 review that pulled together 18 studies found that anywhere from 21 to 98 percent of women improved after their Essure came out, depending on the study, and between 1 and 15 percent didn't improve at all (Miguet-Bensouda and colleagues, 2023). Health Canada's 2016 safety review had already found pain was the most commonly reported problem here, with some women needing surgery to get the device out. In April 2018 the FDA restricted sales to doctors who went through a risk checklist with each patient, and Bayer stopped selling Essure in the United States at the end of that year, voluntarily. It was never formally recalled (FDA activities timeline). Then came the lawsuits. In August 2020, a month after my hysterectomy, Bayer agreed to pay about $1.6 billion US to settle roughly 90 percent of the nearly 39,000 Essure claims filed in the United States, while admitting no wrongdoing and saying it still stands by the device's safety (Bayer, August 20, 2020). In Canada, the class actions are still underway as I write this.
Back to me. For a while after the tubes came out, everything seemed fine. Then the symptoms came back: pelvic pain, severe bloating, a lot of cramping, and very heavy bleeding. I was diagnosed with adenomyosis, where the lining of the uterus grows into the muscle of the uterine wall. By then the reports on what Essure was doing to women around the world were piling up. My doctor and I talked it through, and the decision was made. A full hysterectomy.
A surgery date, a lockdown, and five months off
My surgery was booked for March 2020, one week after everything shut down for COVID. It was cancelled, and I was off work for three months waiting. The lockdown ended on the day I went in for surgery, which was also the day I'd been scheduled to go back to work.
The hysterectomy was laparoscopic, in July 2020, and it went fine. I was home the same day. My uterus and cervix came out. My ovaries stayed, which was my choice. I was 35. The first week I was completely wiped out, and after that the recovery seemed normal, or what I understood normal to be.
What wasn't normal was the five months around it. The three months of waiting through lockdown is what started the weight gain, and the recovery restrictions only made it worse. Every part of recovering happened at home. No physio, no pool, no gym, and once I was healed enough to move properly, not a single piece of exercise equipment in the house. Another two months off work, five in total, and a lot of sitting around.
Where the 30 pounds came from, and where they went
Five months of barely moving will do it. The weight crept on through the waiting and kept going through the recovery, until it came to a solid 30 pounds.
I tried to diet it off. Keto first, which worked a little and then fell apart against the way I like to cook and the meals I make for my family. Intermittent fasting next. Neither one lasted, and neither one got at what was going on underneath, which was a body that did not snap back to how it had been before the surgery.
What finally moved it was less exciting than any of that: eating better, consistently, and strength training. Most of the weight came off that way. It has mostly stayed off, with a big chunk of it in yo-yo land, bouncing between lower and higher numbers. It has taken a lot of discipline, and starting HRT helped, especially with focus and sticking to it. The long version, what worked and what didn't, is spread through losing weight after a hysterectomy.
Two years later: hot flashes before 40
About two years after the surgery, I started getting hot flashes. Then night sweats, then trouble sleeping. I was still under 40. My ovaries were still in. None of it made sense, so I went looking.
What I found was that keeping your ovaries through a hysterectomy doesn't guarantee they keep working. In a 2011 study that followed women aged 30 to 47 for four years, those who'd had a hysterectomy with their ovaries kept were close to twice as likely to reach ovarian failure as women who hadn't had the surgery: about 15 percent compared with 8 percent. The researchers couldn't say whether the surgery itself or the condition behind it was the cause, and that question is still open.
Not one single person had even hinted at that. Not before the surgery, not after. I learned it from a study, on my own, two years too late to ask a single question about it.
By the time bloodwork confirmed early ovarian failure this year, I already had a good idea of what it was going to say. I'm on HRT now.
How it turned into this site
The reading started with the weight. It turned into this project when my ovaries started to fail and I found out, on my own, that nobody had warned me about a risk that was sitting in the literature the whole time.
So this is the site I was looking for and couldn't find. Every medical claim on it links to a source with the year attached, and my own experience is kept separate from the science. Where the evidence is thin, you'll hear that from me. Where you kept your ovaries and were told that meant nothing would change, you'll hear that from me too.
As for me, I'm still working on building the best version of myself. That page in my book hasn't been signed off on yet.
What the last few years of reading have taught me is that women's health needs an overhaul. There is so much conflicting information out there that no single source can be taken on trust. So I'll keep wading through it and sorting it out. If that helps one woman sitting where I was a few years ago make a better decision about her own body, it was time well spent.
Mallory Milne
Last updated: August 21, 2026