Hi I’m new here and am 2 weeks post surgery having had my left tube removed due to an ectopic.
Basically I still feel upset about how difficult it seemed to be to get the right diagnosis and I can’t stop thinking about everything that happened.
I’ll start from the beginning…
So from day 1 of my pregnancy, I knew something wasn’t right as I was spotting brown blood every day from the beginning. At 5 and a half weeks the bleeding turned red and heavier with some cramping so I went to the GP who got me a referal for a scan at the EPAU on the day I would have been 6 weeks.
I go to the scan and they tell me afterwards that they cant find anything so I must have passed the pregnancy. They say my lining is thick and I should expect more bleeding which I do as I carry on bleeding for about 8 days after the scan and then it stops. On the day of the scan my hcg levels are 1589 and I have a follow-up blood test at the GP a week later and my levels have dropped to 341. I get a phone call after the second blood test from EPAU telling me the results confirm the miscarriage and that I just need to do an at home pregnancy test in another 2 weeks. I think that is it.
2 weeks and 1 day after the scan (so I would have been 8 weeks pregnant by now) I am shopping in the supermarket and suddenly get this intense pain in my abdomen and lower back. The pain wasn’t in any particular side but was pretty intense. We go home and shortly after I also start bleeding again but watery brown blood at first. I also start getting pains in my shoulder so I decide to ring 111 and report my symptoms and also the fact that I was diagnosed with a miscarriage 2 weeks earlier. They send an ambulance who take me to A&E. By this point I also have some mild chest pain and the ambulance technician was concerned about my fast heart rate.
In A&E I’m there for about 1 hour and a half and only seen by a nurse and healthcare assistant who have been told to check how much I am bleeding. By now the bleeding is like a fairly light period so not to heavy. I then get transferred to GAU where I get out the bed and have to sit in an assessment room.
At the GAU I am seen by a nurse who does an internal exam to check for clots stuck in my cervix which they arent. They take some blood to test for iron levels and infection markers which show nothing. She feels my abdomen and the left side is much more tendor than the right. They tell me the diagosis is likely an infection of my lining (endometritis) and they say I can go home with antibiotics. It was 1 am by this point and Id been at GAU about 4 hours mostly sat waiting for someone to see me. Not once did I see a doctor and nobody ever mentioned an ectopic. They didn’t even check my hcg levels either.
Over the next week I carry on getting abdominal pain and chest pain although it generally isnt as anywhere near bad as the initial pain I got when it first started. I ring back the GAU 3 days after being discharged to get advice about the chest pain but I’m told its probably just ‘anxiety’. 2 days after that I ring the EPAU to tell them that my pregnancy test is still positive and I tell them that I’m still getting pain and tell them about my A&E visit. They tell me to come in the following day for a blood test to check my hcg levels. The next day the pain is getting worse again so I ring them again to tell them that I might not be able to come in as I cant drive there so they arrange for me to come in that evening when my partner has finished work so he could drive me and have it done at the GAU because the EPAU will be closed. We go in that evening and I have blood taken and I’m told I’ll get a phone call the next morning and that depending on the results I may be sent for a scan. The next morning they haven’t rang so I call up and get told that my hcg levels are now 500 and something so going back up! They tell me to come in straight away for a scan so we go back to the hospital exactly a week after the A&E visit.
Finally I have the scan and they find a mass in my tube and my womb is surrounded by fluid. I get admitted and seen by a doctor who confirms that it is an ectopic pregnancy and I have surgery several hours later. Im told afterwards that they removed the tube which had ruptured and they drained the blood and apparently I was lucky that a lot of the blood had clotted. Maybe this was why I didn’t bleed heavily?
I can’t help feel that the ectopic should have been diagnosed sooner. I was told after having the second scan that they had actually seen something at the first scan I had done at 6 weeks in my left tube but it was so small and they thought it was just a bit of tissue. Shouldn’t they have monitored that?
When the pain started and I went to the hospital I feel like they didn’t really take my symptoms seriously. If they had done a scan then they would have discovered the ectopic. If they had even tested my HCG levels they would have seen that they weren’t dropping any further and were starting to go back up! I was never seen by a doctor at any point during that first visit and nobody ever mentioned the possibility of it being ectopic. I really wish I’d brought it up but then I kept thinking to myself that it couldn’t be because they would have seen it at the first scan! Obviously, I was wrong about that. Basically, they discharged me and left me with a ruptured tube for a week and it took me ringing back 3 times to get them to investigate!
I wish there was some sort of follow up so I could ask questions. I do understand that ectopics can be hard to diagnose but think there were at least 2 opportunities missed to get treated earlier. I was told if I get pregnant again I would need a scan at 6 weeks to check everything is in the right place but considering they missed it this time I’m not exactly filled with confidence!
Sorry that was long! The recovery from the surgery is going ok but I can’t seem to stop thinking about every thing that happened.