I’ve only just joined this board as I’m hoping it will help me come to terms with what’s happened to me within the past couple of weeks. So far even just letting my emotions out has helped so I thought I’d write down the whole story, kind of letting everything spill out. This also is going to be very detailed because I’m finding its easier to tell the full story.
I’m 27 years old and been married for nearly 7 years. I’m one of those people who likes to plan and organise everything in advance so when it came to trying for a baby my husband and I made the decision together to just stop being careful and thought the time was right. We’ve had a rough couple of years which has included financial difficulties and loss of close relatives, including the very sudden loss of my mother in law, which we are still coming to terms with. So we finally got a bit of good luck, having a positive result from a home pregnancy test the day before my husband’s 30th birthday on 9th June. My immediate reaction was one of complete and utter joy and finally thought our run of bad luck was coming to an end. We decided to tell our immediate family our news at a gathering for my husband’s birthday and I also told a couple of close work mates as I thought even though I wasn’t that far on (only about 3 weeks) I was that happy I couldn’t really keep the news to myself. I later came to regret that decision because after the initial thought of joy, I started worrying about whether I would be able to cope with having a baby and how our lives were going to change forever. We’ve had a dog for the past 5 years but obviously that was completely different from having a child and I’d never really been a person who was interested in having children or showed little interest when friends, work colleagues or relatives had babies.
It was a Thursday, 23rd June. I had been feeling cramps all day, a bit like period pain, and thought this was normal, like I would get the period pains but not actually a period. They got steadily worse during the day and I didn’t take any painkillers as I had read conflicting reports about which painkillers I could take and that I couldn’t whilst pregnant. By about 3am on Friday morning the cramps had got so bad that I phoned NHS 24 and they made an appointment for me to see an on-call GP at the local hospital. After a quick examination and doing another pregnancy test, the doctor diagnosed me with constipation and sent me home with a bottle of laxative liquid. I received no painkillers and was told I could take paracetamol for the pain. When we got home, I only just made it into the bathroom when I was violently sick. I did feel better for it, although I still had the cramps, thinking that whatever it was in my stomach and causing the cramps, most of it had come out. I took a dose of laxatives and went to bed. About 5.30am I got up feeling sick again and after being sick had the most horrible dizzy feeling. I still had the cramps, was in constant agony, and had to hold myself up against the wall of the bathroom.
The next thing I knew, I was being shaken awake by my husband. I opened my eyes to find myself lying on the bathroom floor, under the sink, with my husband standing over me asking what I was doing on the floor. After he helped me up, I must have passed out again and came to sitting on the floor, in a pile of sick. By this time I was in a kind of daze and heard my husband in a panic phoning for an ambulance. I remember the ambulance men got me up sitting on a chair but I kept being sick and passing out. I was fine in the ambulance, on the journey to hospital and I was convinced that I was either allergic to the laxatives I had received earlier or I had eaten something and got food poisoning. By the time we got to A&E, I was still in agony and dehydrated due to all the sickness. I remember being freezing and then had bouts of fever, my hands were sweating against the metal bits on the trolley. I was also hooked up to drip to help ease the dehydration and also a blood pressure machine which kept beeping all the time because my blood pressure was still low. When I got waves of fever, the machine beeped again because my pulse kept going up. Several doctors and nurses examined me, including the GP that had seen me in the early hours and the only inkling I got that it was something to do with me being pregnant was when they summond a gynecologist and after being examined by him they told me I was being transferred up to the maternity ward.
When I got up to the maternity ward, they immediately sent me for a scan (the most uncomfortable experience I’ve ever had, especially since I was still in agony) and the only word I remember hearing from the doctor was eptopic. I immediately knew then that the pregnancy was over. He also said there was a lot of fluid around it, which I didn’t understand, but then he said I had to go to theatre immediately and to cancel whoever was next in line for theatre. It was all a bit of a rush, they briefly explained what they were going to do but I think I was just glad to be getting rid of the pain. One of the theatre nurses was actually someone I know who lives locally and I remember her telling me that when I woke up I won’t be in pain any more and I was happy to see somebody I know and she held my hand until I went to sleep.
I was kept in all weekend and I can’t really remember who told me about the blood loss, I was told I lost a litre which was the fluid that had been seen on the scan picture. One of the junior doctors did come and speak to me and told me exactly what happened, that they had removed one of my tubes completely. To my husband and family who came to see me whilst I was in hospital I seemed to be ok but I was kept on the maternity ward, albeit in a private room, and a couple of times the emotions hit me when I heard babies crying in the ward and I just the tears flow. The night before I got home, on the Sunday, one of the babies was screaming all night, it was more like an “I’m in pain” scream rather than an “I’m hungry” scream, like there was something really wrong with it, and I had to shut the door to try and block it out, that’s when it hit me that if that was my baby then I would have tried to get someone like a doctor or midwife to see what was wrong with it, rather than letting it scream all night. I couldn’t sleep at all that night and spent most of it in tears. My family couldn’t understand why I was left in the maternity ward but they were the best people to deal with eptopics and I did agree I was in the right place, apart from when I heard the babies crying or seen parents leaving with their newborns. Even now when I think back, I’m in tears at the memories of lying in the hospital alone, in the middle of the night, and hearing those babies screaming and crying, and no matter what I did, even with closing the door, windows and curtains, I couldn’t blot them out.
Now I’ve started to heal physically, the bruises are fading and my stitches have dissolved, I think the emotional side is coming out. My husband has gone back to work and being a chef works double shifts, one during the day, then comes home, and then works again at night. Its these times when he is away I find I need somebody to talk to. My family have said they are there when I need them and a lot of them did come to visit me after I got home from hospital but as the days have gone by, I’ve seen less of them and I don’t just want to go round and see them, even though I think that is what I need. That’s part of the reason why I joined this board, to read about other people’s experiences and similarities in the hope that it will help ease the emotional pain I’m feeling at the moment. I have told members of my family exactly what happened, but now I’m feeling more emotional I need people to talk to more than ever but I’ve never been the type of person to lay of all my problems onto other people. I don’t want to just call one of my sisters in law and say look I need someone to talk to, to lay off to, but I’m beginning to now think I should. I shouldn’t really be pushing people away.
I know this has been really long but hopefully reading this will help somebody. Its certainly helping me to get things out in the open.