Complications

On Monday, I was composing a post in my head about how well this pregnancy seems to be going. My symptoms were good over the weekend – fatigue, increasing nausea, etc. I was ready for lunch by 10:30 a.m. on Monday (the women in the office were laughing at me), and I made R stop and get me a ridiculously large dinner when he stopped by my office at 4:30 p.m. because I was already starving again. Just before he arrived, I went to the bathroom. Everything was fine – not even a speck of spotting.

Less than three hours later, there was blood. Not just a little bit of spotting, but a small clot in the toilet and enough to bleed through to my pants. I paged the doctor on call at my ob/gyn’s office, and he advised us to go to the emergency room.

So we did. And we sat and waited, and sat and waited, with me getting up every hour or so to go pass more clots. When you’re barely 6 weeks pregnant and bleeding, the ER docs and nurses know there’s really nothing they can do for you, so you are at the bottom of the waiting room food chain.

We sat there for five hours, until 1 a.m. I finally went back to the triage nurse, told her I was thinking I’d probably be better off just going home and promptly burst into tears. She promised to try to get me a bed as quickly as she could, which turned out to be another hour later.

They put me in the ER’s ob/gyn room, which at least afforded us a little more privacy than being in a bed separated only by curtains. I remember R and I joking and laughing about things, although at this point I don’t remember what the subject of our jesting was. I just remember commenting on how perverse it seemed that we are able to laugh while I’m sitting there possibly bleeding out our baby. But I guess we’ve been through this so much that it doesn’t phase us like it used to.

An ultrasound was done, and the tech couldn’t see a gestational sac. We thought that was the beginning of the end, but then my hcg level came back at almost 7,400. The first miscarriage I experienced was at pretty much the exact same point in the pregnancy, and that time my hcg on that day was only 424. So we grasped onto the little bit of hope that number presented.

We finally got home at 6:30 a.m. on Tuesday, and then slept for several hours. The bleeding had turned to light spotting, and by early afternoon, it stopped altogether for a few hours. It returned Tuesday night, but by this morning was brown instead of pinkish red and then stopped by late morning.

We went to my ob/gyn for another ultrasound today. He was able to see a gestational sac, although he said it only looked like it was about 5 weeks, and I’m 6w3d today. He wasn’t happy with the quality of images he gets from his machine for this early stage, so he’s sending me for a level 2 ultrasound someplace else on Friday morning.

The spotting resumed again after the ultrasound, but it’s still very light and mostly brown, so I’m trying to take those as good signs. Our RE thinks we still have a good chance of this working out, and that I probably lost a baby on Monday night. The ob/gyn says we “have a fighting chance” and he’s not willing to say it’s a non-viable pregnancy at this point, but of course he’d prefer the sac be bigger. (Wouldn’t we all?!)

So for now I’m sitting at home, trying to rest and not drive myself too crazy worrying about what is ultimately beyond my control at this point. I’m going to try to catch up with all of you during the next few days.