Up in arms
Anney Madden, 22, from Pontypridd, endured the pain of doctors rooting around inside her arm...
As I ran my hand up the inside of my sister’s arm, I could feel a tiny bump. Laura, 26, was showing me her contraceptive implant.
‘You should get one,’ she said. ‘You’ll never have to worry about remembering to take the Pill.’ It was something I was bad at. Even though I kept them on my bedside table, for some reason, I just couldn’t remember to take my Pill.
‘I need to be more careful,’ I’d told my boyfriend Marcus, 22. Now Laura had convinced me. A few weeks later, I went to the sexual health clinic at the Royal Glamorgan Hospital. There, a nurse used a numbing spray to freeze my upper arm, and then made a tiny incision on my inner bicep. Then she slipped the implant in. It was only the size of a match. I was given a card with the date of the insertion, so I knew when to have it replaced – in three years.
The next morning, I felt around my arm, expecting to feel a small bump.
‘That’s strange,’ I said to Marcus. ‘I can’t feel anything.’ So I called the clinic. ‘It’s nothing to worry about,’ a nurse reassured me. ‘As long as you don’t have any pain or swelling.’
So I put it to the back of my mind, and for three years, the implant
didn’t give me any trouble. Every month, I got my period like clockwork. Before I knew it, it was time to have it replaced. But, as the nurse rubbed her hand over my arm, she frowned. ‘I can’t feel it,’
she said. She referred me
to a GP, who, after poking and prodding around, said she could feel it in my arm. So, she numbed
my arm like before, and used a scalpel to make an incision.
But after a bit of poking about, she said she couldn’t find it. My implant had gone walkabout! ‘We can’t seem to find it for now, so I recommend you use another form of contraception,’ she told me.
So I decided to have the contraceptive injection. But that left me feeling so emotional and depressed all the time.
It got to the point where I couldn’t even go to work.
I worked at a care home, and having to plaster on a smile as I served meals and tidied rooms just got too much for me. Eventually I went back to my GP. ‘You should come off hormonal contraception,’ she told me.
‘It’s likely the implant will interfere with it.’
But I need to find the implant,i thought, worried.
It was still somewhere in my arm... it had to be!
So, in August 2016, I went to the hospital to have an X-ray.
And there it was, hiding beneath my bicep!
Again, I was sprayed with a numbing solution and a doctor started to dig about. The pain was so bad, I fainted. But still they couldn’t find it… A year later, it showed up on an ultrasound. Doctors made a bigger
cut this time, but after much painful rooting around my arm, they came out empty-handed.
Next, a gynaecologist recommended I have surgery.
That way, I can at least be sedated while surgeons make an even bigger cut in my arm.
So for now, I’m on the waiting list to have that done.
But I’ve already got a 7cm scar along my arm.
I’ve also developed pains in my arm, and pins and needles in two of my fingers.
Doctors think the implant has been dislodged and is causing my muscle to press against a nerve.
Unfortunately there’s nothing they can do for me apart from prescribe me painkillers.
I used to be forgetful about taking my Pill, but this is one painful experience I will never forget.
It had vanished into my flesh