Hello good people,
I have had two ectopics, which I’ll detail below, and I spent a lot of time on this website looking for a sign that things might be ok. I thought I would share where I’m up to now in the hope that it might help anyone out there searching for hope.
Dec 2017- first pregnancy, very exciting! I began to bleed lightly, and didn’t think much of it until my best friend (a midwife) drilled in to me how serious it might be, so I was on the look out for pain. When it showed up I went straight to the hospital. Scans showed it was a tubal ectopic and my left tube was removed. My husband was actually away at the time and it was a couple of days before I could contact him to talk through the surgery/methotrexate decision, but we eventually made contact and went with surgery. He made it to the hospital the morning of my surgery, so that was a relief. Our wedding was four weeks away, so that served as a distraction of sorts.
14 weeks following the surgery- fell pregnant again. Unbelievably grateful to have a healthy and straightforward pregnancy that resulted in the most beautiful and health bundle of little baby girl. She was born Dec 2018.
Conceived what we were hoping would be our second in Dec 2019, and it felt like perfect timing. Given my history I was on top of it and went straight in for bloods and scans (I had only just stopped breastfeeding and my periods were irregular, so I wasn’t too sure on the dates, though I had been recording them religiously). There was about 10 days of emotional speculation, peppered with doctors, radiographers, and pathologists. I am in the country and drive around a lot, sometimes over an hour out of town, so I had to tell my boss I had to stay in the office until I knew what was going on. He was great about it.
I hadn’t had any bleeding but began to feel a dull ache at what turned out to be about the six week mark, and off we went again to the hospital. They couldn’t find anything in the uterus, but couldn’t find anything anywhere else either. HCG was high enough that methotrexate probably wouldn’t work, and it would very likely rupture in the meantime. So surgery it was, but it was exploratory in that they had to look around and try and find it. They suspected it was on the outside of the uterus, so I had to sign the paperwork saying that anything up to and including my uterus would be removed, depending on the need. Worst case scenario was the pregnancy was on the outside of the uterus and they would have to cut it away, then if they couldn’t stop the bleeding (as it’s more or less a flat surface compared to a tube), they would have to remove the uterus. Very scary, as other users have said. My poor husband had to drive home with our one year old thinking that it might just be the two of them. Not likely, but possible.
A few hours before I was going to surgery, it ruptured. I was already on the surgical ward and by the time I was taken down to the theatre I had already lost 1L of blood. Turns out my remaining tube had picked up the egg, deposited it in the correct spot, and then the egg had squirmed back into the stump of the one that was removed, (tubal stump ectopic) which does happen sometimes but is very rare. So I was left with one functioning tube and a serious revision of my plans for having a large family.
We were advised that we could try again as soon as the HCG was down to 0, and within about three months I had conceived again. I was feeling pretty hopeless and the HCG readings weren’t rising like they should have been. Those agonising periods of waiting for news seem to me to be harder every time. This time I was sure that it was bad news again; I had been feeling off and the HGC numbers pretty much told me and the doc that the best I could hope for was a straightforward miscarriage.
Somehow, unbelievably, it was a healthy pregnancy. The HCG numbers were some sort of anomaly, and everything looked fine. It took me a few days to get my head around it, and then I spent the rest of the pregnancy thinking something would go wrong. But it was a worry free pregnancy, fairly uncomplicated delivery, and we had a healthy little baby boy.
Although I know that all situations are different, I wanted to share this to offer some hope to those searching for it. If anyone reading this has a good news story, please do feel free to add it. I think all the time about how lucky we are to have our two little loves, and I hope that some good luck finds its way to everyone who has felt the need to search these forums.
