In 2014, not long after my son was born, I asked my doctor to tie my tubes. I was done having kids and I wanted permanent. He sold me something newer instead.
Essure. Two tiny coils, slipped into the fallopian tubes right there in the office. No scalpel, no hospital, no downtime. Scar tissue does the rest, sealing the tubes shut for good. It sounded a lot better than surgery, so I said yes.
Within a week I was in pain I couldn't stand. It got worse fast, and it woke up an old back injury on the way.
Here's what those coils actually are, and this part isn't my story, so it comes with sources. Each insert is two of them: an outer coil of nickel and titanium, and an inner coil of stainless steel wound with polyester fibres, called PET, whose whole job is to make the tube scar over and grow into the device (van Gastel and colleagues, 2020). That's the design working as intended. It's also why getting one out is a fight. The fibres are knitted into your own tissue, the brittle outer coil can snap when a surgeon pulls on it, and the fragments are small and easy to lose. The surgeons who've written up these removals say the only way to be sure nothing tears off inside you is to take the whole tube with a wedge of the uterus, or the uterus itself (van Gastel, 2020). There are documented cases of women still carrying pieces after their tubes were already out (Pepin and Einarsson, 2019). And the coils don't always stay put: of the 73,678 Essure complaints the FDA had logged by the end of 2024, 6,033 described a coil that had migrated, 9,838 a perforation, and 10,493 a fragment left behind in the patient (FDA, updated March 2025).
I didn't have any of those numbers in 2014. I had a coil in each tube and a body that started screaming inside a week.
Taking the tubes out was supposed to fix it
So in 2015 we removed my fallopian tubes, coils and all. My first surgery. I went in sure that was the end of it.
Pulling the tubes doesn't always end it. A 2023 review of 18 studies found improvement in anywhere from 21 to 98 percent of women after their Essure came out, depending on the study, and no improvement at all in 1 to 15 percent (Miguet-Bensouda and colleagues, 2023).
I was in the group it didn't fix.
For a while I felt fine. Then it all came back: pelvic pain, brutal bloating, relentless cramping, bleeding that wouldn't quit. This time the diagnosis was adenomyosis, where the lining of the uterus grows down into the muscle of the wall. By then the reports on what Essure was doing to women worldwide were stacking up, my doctor and I had run out of smaller options, and in July 2020 I had a full hysterectomy. Uterus and cervix, gone. Which, it turns out, is exactly where a lot of Essure stories end up.
What the pitch left out
None of the following was ever mentioned when I said yes to an in-office device with "no downtime."
In 2016, Health Canada's own review found pain was the most-reported problem with Essure, with some women needing surgery to get the device out (Health Canada, 2016). In April 2018 the FDA restricted sales to doctors who walked each patient through a risk checklist (FDA activities timeline). By the end of that year, Bayer pulled Essure from the US market on its own (FDA, January 2020). It was never formally recalled. Then, in August 2020, one month after my hysterectomy, Bayer agreed to pay about 1.6 billion US dollars to settle roughly 90 percent of nearly 39,000 Essure claims, while admitting no wrongdoing and maintaining that the device is safe (Bayer, August 20, 2020). In Canada, the class actions are still grinding on as I write this.
A device that scarred my tubes shut on purpose, took two surgeries to be rid of, and cost its maker over a billion dollars to settle (so far). And nobody did anything wrong. Sure.
The stubborn weight
My surgery was first booked for March 2020, one week before the world shut down. Cancelled. I sat home three months waiting, went in the day lockdown finally lifted, which was also the day I'd been due back at work, and then spent two more months recovering. Five months, barely moving. No gym, no pool, no physio, not a dumbbell in the house. The weight came on, and it did not want to leave.
I tried a few things, and had more luck with some than others. Keto and intermittent fasting both moved the needle. But what finally shifted it for good was unglamorous: more protein, more vegetables, no sugary drinks, and strength training, once I clued in that it beat the cardio I'd been wasting my time on. Most of it came off. Most of it has stayed off, with a stubborn chunk that still lives in yo-yo land. It took real discipline.
The part nobody warned me about
About four years after the surgery, the hot flashes started. Then night sweats, then nights I couldn't sleep. I was under 40 and I'd kept my ovaries on purpose, so none of it made sense.
Keeping your ovaries through a hysterectomy doesn't mean they'll keep working. A 2011 study that followed women aged 30 to 47 for four years found that those who'd had a hysterectomy with their ovaries left in were nearly twice as likely to reach ovarian failure: about 15 percent, against 8 percent in women who hadn't had the surgery (Moorman and colleagues, 2011). The researchers couldn't say whether it was the surgery itself or the condition behind it, and that question is still open.
Not one person, before, during, or after, had so much as hinted this could happen. I found it in a study, on my own, four years too late to ask a single question.
Why this site exists
This is the page I went looking for at 3am and couldn't find (at least, not easily, and not all under the same roof). So I built it.
Every medical claim on this site links to a real source with the year attached. Where the evidence is thin, you'll hear that from me.
I'm still working on the best version of myself. That's one page in my book that hasn't been signed off yet. But everything the last few years taught me lands in the same place: women's health needs an overhaul. There's too much conflicting noise out there for any one source to be taken on faith, so I'll keep wading through it and sorting it out. If that helps one woman sitting where I was make a better call about her own body, it was time well spent.
Mallory Milne