Tuesday morning, the doctor's office called me with my quant count. It went up to 623. Not much, but it went up. I wasn't feeling very well at all and decided to go over to my mom's house (somehow moms always know how to make you feel better). I got to her house around 11 AM and my cramping was getting worse and my spotting was more like bleeding than spotting. I took some Tylenol for the pain (because that's pretty much the only thing you can take when you're pregnant); It didn't help in the slightest. So I laid down on the couch and my mom brought me the heating pad. I stayed on the couch for the next couple hours until finally I couldn't stand the pain any longer. It was getting really bad. I told my mom I was going to have to go the hospital. I got in the car and started driving. I wanted to go to St. Francis Women's Hospital but it was a 30 minute drive and Hillcrest Hospital was only a 5 minute drive. Since I almost passed out 3 times from the pain, I decided on Hillcrest. I parked and walked in to the ER. I checked in with the receptionist and he was so nice. He was genuinely concerned for me and he didn't want me to pass out so he put me in a wheelchair and parked me in front of his desk until the triage nurse could come get me. At this point I was in tears and out of breath because I'm pretty sure I was having contractions. Two people were ahead of me and finally the triage nurse called me back. I told her what was going on and she was extremely rude to me. She said "Why did you come here? We don't have an OB here." I was furious at this point so I snapped back and told her I was in excruciating pain and I couldn't drive myself any further without passing out and if they had doctors at this hospital, I'm pretty sure they knew a little bit about OBGYN. She shut up after that and got me back to a room. I sat in the room by myself waiting on my nurse to make her rounds. It seemed like forever and I just laid there looking up and the ceiling, cried and then I prayed for Jesus to just come hold me and comfort me. It was amazing at how quickly I felt reassured and at peace. Finally my nurse came in and got my IV started and then she had to give me a catheter. Let me tell you, I'm pretty sure the whole ER heard me at this point. I was already having contractions and then putting a catheter in only made it 10x worse. But they had to do it because I needed to have an ultrasound done and they needed my bladder full. The two ultrasound techs came and got me and pushed me down to the ultrasound room, I had to get off the bed and walk into the room and lay on another bed. Then they proceeded to squeeze liquids through the catheter and into my bladder. And yes, I was still having contractions at this point and every time she would squeeze I would pull myself into a sitting position, with a death grip on the bed railings and scream out loud in pain. I was having a hard time holding still, which made it harder for them to try to find what they needed to find on the ultrasound. I apologized to them for being so difficult but told them how much pain I was in. They paged my nurse and told her they could tell I was in severe pain and they needed her to come bring me some medicine. She came in and put morphine and phenergen into my IV and within a matter of seconds, I was feeling much better and was able to cooperate with them so they could finish the ultrasound. I told them how the day before the tech at my OB was able to find the gestational sac. They looked and looked but they couldn't find it. They walked me back into the hallway and put me back on the bed that came from my room. As I was climbing back onto the bed, I noticed a golf ball size blood clot laying there on the bed. They quickly cleaned it up and helped me back onto the bed and wheeled me back to my room. My sister was waiting in my room when I got back. The ER doctor came in a little while later and talked with me. He said he called my OB office and spoke with one of the doctors there. They wanted me to call first thing the next morning so they could see me. The ER doctor wrote me a prescription for pain and one for nausea to hold me over the rest of the night and then discharged me. Amber drove me back to my mom's since I couldn't drive.
I spent the night at my mom's house because Eric had to be at work early the next morning and I needed someone to keep an eye on me. I called my OB around 9:00 On Wednesday and they asked me to come in as soon as I could get there. We got ready and my mom drove me up there around 10:00. They got me back for another ultrasound and the tech confirmed that she too couldn't find the sac that was showing up on the ultrasound on Monday. Then she sent me in to one of the examination rooms where I waited to be seen by Dr. Kofoed (she was the doctor who delivered Elijah when he was born). She reviewed the ultrasounds from the last 3 days and then did an examination and pushed around on my stomach a little bit. She was torn between my diagnosis. Either it was ectopic or a miscarriage, but either way, my pregnancy wasn't viable. The fact that my HCG kept going up, made her suspect ectopic, but when she pushed on my stomach, I wasn't jumping up off the table and she said women with ectopic pregnancies usually cannot stand to have their stomachs pressed on. So then she told me there were 3 solutions: 1) Wait it out and let my body cleanse itself naturally...but she told me this really wasn't an option for me since we didn't know if it was ectopic or not and I could stand the risk of something rupturing if I let it go. 2) Get a shot of this medicine that would basically cleanse my body out over a period of 4 days or so. 3) Have surgery- A laparoscopy D&C. She told me she suggested the shot because with surgery I stood a chance of losing one of my fallopian tubes. She told me to think it over for a few minutes and she would be back to get my answer. I honestly did not like the option of getting the shot. It just felt wrong to me. It somehow seemed like an abortion and the thought of it made me feel sick. I called Eric and told him what was going on and told him how I felt about the medicine and told him with the surgery I stood a chance of losing a tube but he agreed with me as well that the surgery seemed like the better option for us. Plus, right after Dr Kofoed gave me my options I heard this voice loud and clear telling me "Do the surgery. Do the surgery." So when Dr. Kofoed came back in and asked what I decided, I told her I wanted to do the surgery. She seemed shocked and said "Really?" and when I nodded she was like "Ok, I'll go call the OR and I'll be right back." She came back a few minutes later and said I would be having surgery at 4PM and to go ahead over to the hospital (which was right next door). So me, my mom and Elijah headed over to the hospital. I called Eric and he was going to leave work early to come up there. I got checked in and pretty soon they called me back to a room. I had some of the nicest nurses. They talked to me and seemed genuinely concerned for me. They got my IV started, did some bloodwork and other things. And then I just sat there and watched TV until they took me back for surgery, which ended up being closer to 5PM. The anesthesiologist pushed me back to the OR and he was asking me questions and joking around. I could feel myself slowing down and the next thing I knew I was waking up in the recovery room. I was in severe pain but couldn't tell them because I lost my voice from having the tube stuck down my throat during surgery. I just whimpered and that seemed to get my point across. It took 3 doses of medicine before the pain finally went away. Dr. Kofoed came in shortly after to tell me how the surgery went; I vaguely remember bits and pieces of it but my family caught me up on what happened. When she went in to do the D&C she got a scraping of the tissue in my uterus and had the pathologist test it. He came back and said it wasn't pregnancy tissue, which meant one of two things; either I had miscarried the day before when I was in the ER or the pregnancy was ectopic and was somewhere else in my body. She called in one of my other favorite doctors from the practice, Dr. Alt for a second opinion to see if they could noticeably see the pregnancy somewhere else in my body; they couldn't. Dr. Kofoed was afraid to open up my tube to find the pregnancy when she wasn't absolutely sure it was in there because I could lose my tube. So she decided to just sew me up and give me the shot that cleaned everything out. Before she closed me up, she found a mass of scar tissue from the laparoscopy I had done last year to remove endometriosis. The scar tissue was pulling up on my uterus and probably causing me a lot of pain and possibly fertility issues. This surgery was a huge blessing in disguise as it helped Dr. Kofoed to remove something could have potentially caused me a lot of pain and problems down the road. I don't doubt I heard that voice telling me to do the surgery for a reason. I could hear Dr. Kofoed and the nurses talking about moving me to a room because they wanted to monitor me for a few hours once they give me the shot. All of a sudden one of the nurses came back with the results from the blood work they did when they put my IV in before the surgery; my HCG levels had gone from 630 something the day before down to 160 something. This meant that I did, in fact, have a miscarriage the day before when I went to the ER. So now they didn't have to give me the shot. I stayed in recovery for a little while longer and then they got me ready and discharged me. I went back to my mom's and fell asleep on the couch almost immediately. I've been resting a lot as the medicine keeps me pretty drowsy. I'm on light duty until I go back in 2 weeks so I've been trying to take it easy. I overdid it yesterday and one of my incisions opened back up and started draining. It smelled pretty bad so I had to call the on-call nurse who called me in an antibiotic in case it's infected and she told me to call back on Monday and see what the doctor says about it. As always, keep me in your prayers as this week has been incredibly hard on me emotionally as well as physically. I randomly break out in tears and it seems that all I see everywhere I look is something to do with babies. It breaks my heart every single time.
