Where I've been

Here's your fair warning: this is going to be long and emotional. Continue reading at your own risk.

It's now been two weeks. Two weeks since all hell broke loose in my life. And we're still picking up the pieces, and I'm sure will continue to do so for quite some time. You see, three weeks and one day ago, I took a pregnancy test. Two of them, in fact. They were positive. Ryan and I were cautiously excited. There had been some weirdnesses in my body that I'll spare the details of, but enough so that we didn't immediately start jumping up and down. In fact, I went ahead and went to the doctor 2 days later, just to be sure everything was ok. Everything looked ok, I did bloodwork twice, and all of that looked fine, too.

So Mother's Day weekend, we told our moms. It was getting exciting. My second Mother's Day with Cade, and I was pregnant, too. I was excited about the timing of our announcement, as well as the spacing of our kids.

Sunday evening, I started feeling terrible. It went from bad to worse in a very short amount of time. I was having horrible pain in my abdomen. Ryan wanted to take me to the ER, but I wanted to tough it out. My mom came over for a while, but I started feeling enough better that we sent her home and went on to bed. I couldn't ever get to sleep, and around 1:45 I woke Ryan up because the pain had gotten horrific again. He called my mom and she came over to stay with Cade while we went to the hospital.

We got right in (bless small-town hospitals that are not busy!) and did all the usual stuff. We eventually had an ultrasound, and the tech found the baby's heartbeat and said everything looked fine with that. They started me on fluids and then some antibiotics because my white blood cell count was slightly elevated. I was still in some pain, but not as much. A surgeon came in to see me and wanted to do a CT scan to make sure it wasn't my appendix. Doing a CT scan while pregnant poses some danger to the baby, but they felt it was more important to find out what was wrong with me because a ruptured appendix would most definitely harm the baby. So we (tearfully) made the decision to go ahead with it.

I drank this gross stuff to prepare for it. An hour or so later, they came back and said that the radiologist refused to do a CT on a pregnant woman. The ER dr was on the phone with my OB, debating on whether to transfer me to the hospital where my OB could see me, but eventually decided to just admit me to the hospital and observe me. We hung out there all day. My pain had subsided into terrible soreness in my entire abdomen. They sent us home that night without ever actually diagnosing me with anything.

The rest of that week, Ryan's mom stayed with us to help take care of Cade because I was not functional. She took Cade back to Arkansas with her on Thursday, which had already been planned because we were supposed to be leaving to go to DC. We cancelled our trip, but she took Cade anyway so we could still have some time with just the two of us. On Thursday afternoon, my OB's office called. She wanted to see me the next day. They had gotten my chart from the ER visit and were concerned about a huge drop in my hemoglobin. She felt sure that I had lost a significant amount of blood somewhere (I hadn't bled any during the visit to the hospital or later in the week). They also scheduled me for another ultrasound.

Friday morning. I go in to the lab to get blood taken for the 4th time that week (not counting the IV from the hospital). We head over to the dr's office for the ultrasound. It takes the tech about 10 minutes to say she needed to talk to the dr. Her printer wasn't working, so she went to get my dr and bring her in to the room. We knew something wasn't right. But I also knew she had found a heartbeat, so it couldn't have been that bad, right? Wrong.

They showed us a picture of my uterus. It was completely empty. There was nothing there. The pregnancy (in spite of what the ultrasound tech in the ER in our cute little small-town hospital said) was ectopic. My OB said that it had attached in my left tube, and everything that I had gone through on the previous Sunday night was most likely that tube rupturing. All of the symptoms I had had were classic tubal pregnancy. She was very confused as to why they had not caught it that night, because she had specifically asked them to make sure it wasn't ectopic, and they assured her it wasn't. The huge drop in my hemoglobin was due to about a liter of blood that was around my uterus. Also the reason for my soreness in my abdomen all week.

She said that we had to take care of it immediately. The baby, at that point, still had a heartbeat. This meant that, although it wasn't in my uterus, it had found a blood supply somewhere. But there was no way the baby could survive. And if we waited much longer, it would kill me, too.

We went straight over to the hospital. I had laparascopic surgery to remove the pregnancy, and they had to remove my left tube as well because of the extent of the damage. It was outpatient, so we went home after I came out of the anesthesia. The first day or so after that is a complete blur. I slept a lot. I cried a lot. That was pretty much all I did until Tuesday when Cade finally came back home.

Ryan's mom and sister stayed with us from Tuesday to Thursday to help me and keep up with Cade. I still haven't been released to lift him, so I can't be by myself with him at all. My mom stayed with me Friday, and Ryan's mom will be back tonight to stay with me until I can be Cade's full-time mommy again.

I am so grateful for my wonderful friends and family who stepped up to help. We wouldn't have made it through this time without them. We love you all.

I ask that you would continue praying for us. I'm healing physically, but emotionally still very raw (although I have finally stopped randomly crying every hour, so that's progress!). The sorrow of losing a baby is indescribable. Adding to that right now is frustration at not being able to take care of the child I already have. He wants his mommy to pick him up and doesn't understand why I can't. But I'm able to do more with him every day, so that helps.

I haven't been praying a whole lot through this. But I know God is still there. And He is still taking care of me. Because if He weren't, I'm pretty sure I would still be crying constantly.

I cannot even describe how wonderful Ryan has been through all of this. He has been my rock. Not that I had any doubt before, but it is very clear how much he loves me. I don't even want to think about some of the things he has had to do for me in the last two weeks. I love him so much and couldn't even think about going through any of this with anyone else.