On November 18, 2020, within a couple hours of laying our sweet Annie Kate down to sleep on the night of her 1st birthday, I felt an intense rush of pain that could not be ignored.
It was as if acid was being poured into my abdomen, and in my heart I knew what had happened. My ectopic pregnancy must have ruptured.
Luke wondered if I should try taking some pain medicine and seeing if that helped at all. But I knew this was not normal or like any pain I had ever experienced before.
Very quickly we were moving out to the car and waiting for his mom to come and stay with our sleeping children. I was filled with fear as I wondered if I was bleeding internally and if I was going to be OK. Every bump in the road intensified the pain, and it felt like our 12 minute drive was 5 times longer.
I was immediately given a bed in the ER and they got the good pain medicine going right away. Can I just say thank God for pain medicine? My blood pressure was in the 180s and the pain was excruciating.
I was informed that I would need an ultrasound to determine what was really going on, though I couldn’t imagine what else it could possibly be. I don’t have an appendix — not sure what else could explode inside of me. During the ultrasound it was clear that there was “free fluid” in my abdomen, meaning the fallopian tube had ruptured and I was bleeding internally.
The rest of the evening is somewhat blurry. I am not clear on the timeline. I know that the operating doctor came in to explain what was going to happen and that she would try to save the fallopian tube if she could. She also explained that my previous 3 cm mass had grown to 9 cm, even through two injections of methotrexate.
Shortly after, I was wheeled to surgery, giving Luke a goodbye kiss, and taken to the OR. Cold and sterile – operating rooms are definitely not comforting. However, I had wonderful care by all of my doctors and nurses that evening. They definitely helped to comfort and reassure me. Anesthesia is so interesting to me. It’s insane that I can literally be awake and coherent one minute and then completely passed out the next. But again – can I get an amen for modern medicine?
I think we got to my room between 2:00-3:00 a.m. Again, the timelines are fuzzy (and irrelevant). I just know it was the middle of the night. We squeezed in a few hours of sleep before the morning rounds. The doctor came in to tell me that she had to remove my entire fallopian tube as it could not be salvaged. We have some photos, too, if anyone is interested in seeing those (sarcasm).
Within a few hours after that, I was home. Ending up in emergency surgery was certainly not in the plan. Doing the methotrexate injections was supposed to keep me from surgery, but… #2020.
I have had a solid month to think about this whole situation, and a couple take-aways jump out at me.
First and foremost – you know your body best. Yes, you.
You will know if there is a pain that is different than before. If you are in excruciating pain to where you can’t stand up and can barely walk…then something is wrong and you need to get help. This sounds so silly, I know, but I have noticed a pattern with me and a lot of other women I know. We don’t want to be burdens. We don’t want to be wrong. We don’t want people to think we are annoying. We don’t want to call doctors in the middle of the night because what if they are sleeping. We don’t want to make people come over and watch our kids. We don’t want to look like wimps. But dammit, women die (yes, die) because they don’t tend to their own needs. They put off going to the doctor. They suck it up and rub dirt on it and keep moving because most of the time, they have to. There many times seems to be no other choice than to just keep playing through the pain.
But after I was home and in recovery, I looked up what happens when an ectopic pregnancy ruptures, and women can die from this because the abdominal cavity can hold almost the entire body’s worth of blood in it. If you ignore the pain and don’t seek help quickly, you can literally bleed to death internally.
I am not trying to be dramatic. But I am trying to make a point. Take care of yourself. Listen to your body. You know when something is wrong. This goes for anything – a broken bone, stomach pain, terrible headaches, whatever it is. Don’t be afraid to speak up for yourself and get checked out. It could be nothing, and that’s fine. Or it could be something that needs attention. I cringe when I think about if I would have just tried to go to sleep that night for fear of inconveniencing the doctors or my family.
Grief is a bitch.
I’m sorry to be so frank, but it is. Over the past month since my surgery and about 7 weeks since I learned I was not having a normal pregnancy, I have had days where I have managed to smile, laugh, be happy, and otherwise go on with my life.
I will be doing alright, and then something will knock me down so hard and fast, and I am in despair for days at a time. It’s like one, huge punch to the gut that leaves you brutally winded.
In the past, my grief in other situations has looked like a lot of crying. But this grief has been different. I have been angry. I have been jealous. I have been somewhat manic. I have been numb. I will go on compulsive cleaning binges to get my mind on something else. Or I will stay awake until 4:00 a.m. with racing thoughts.
Grief can be a very isolating process because it is so individual for everyone. For example, Luke’s grief really looks nothing like mine. We are not feeling the same things in the same ways, and because of that, we are on two different paths to healing. I think we will both get there eventually, but we aren’t following the same road map.
Christmas was difficult for me. For one, it is really exhausting to pretend like nothing is wrong when something is wrong. I think we all understand that. And if there’s ever a time for a mom to slap on her happy face and keep going, it’s Christmas.
But also, Christmas was the time we were planning to announce the pregnancy. We would have been around that 12-13 week mark, and so we were going to share the news with our family and friends. It’s wild how your mind just runs with ideas so quickly. Within days of learning about the baby, I was already planning how we would spill the beans. So when this Christmas came and went, I naturally felt empty. No baby in my belly. No pregnancy to announce. A heart full of ache and a soul full of painfully unique grief.
I wrote this post to tie together what happened since my last post on November 16. I hope that this time next year, I can reread it and be in a more peaceful place. But it might still hurt like Hell, and I might still be grieving. Life is messy, nothing is perfect, and absolutely nothing is guaranteed.
