Coming Full Circle - Ch. 3

CHAPTER 3

I had chalked four days of bleeding up to being my period and moved on. About the time I was to start ovulating again, I began to bleed for three days. Looking back, I am not sure why I let it go on for that long. It wasn't anything that had ever happened to me before. Ignoring it was kind of the best option at the time. On Wednesday, August 13th, I woke up feeling "off". I had one client coming for a massage that I could not cancel because she was headed off to college and would not be home till Thanksgiving. Then I was supposed to head to my job that afternoon and work into the evening. Feeling crumby, I decided to keep the massage appointment, but called in sick to my other job for the afternoon. Scott was in the kitchen getting ready to leave for work. I told him that I wasn't feeling well and wasn't going to work. He said "are you really that sick", to which I replied, "YES!", but not exactly sure why.

It took everything I had to get through the massage, but I did. After it was over, I decided that I felt like this was something that was out of my hands. I called the only gynecologist that I knew of in the area. They said they could work me in on August 28th. I took the appointment and then called my mom for advice. I relayed all my symptoms to her and she said she would get back to me. She was in Arkansas with my sister who had just had a baby eight days earlier. I mustered the energy to make myself some red raspberry tea and I sat at the kitchen table pondering. I had self diagnosed myself with a ruptured ovarian cyst after walking around the house hunched over in pain. It wasn't my appendix, I knew that much. Shortly after that my mom called back to tell me that she had researched and came up with me having a tumor or an ectopic pregnancy.

"Could you be pregnant?", I remember her asking.

"Well, I wasn't sharing that info, but yes, we had tried."

She told me to call the doctor back and ask for an urgent appointment, so I did. They could work me in the next morning at 8:30am, but told me to go to the ER if I felt like it was an emergency. I called my mom back and she agreed that an ER visit may be warranted.

I was home alone until 9:30 that night. I had been trying not to bother Scott and work with all this because I knew he would worry. I asked him for some chocolate chip ice cream on the way home. I ate it curled up in a little ball in the corner of the couch. Scott was watching the Olympics and I went into the bedroom, laid down and cried. He came in and asked "is it really that bad?" I was just not sure what to do. I was scared. I said I think we should go to the ER. It was about 10:30pm. I got up and got dressed and sat on the edge of the bed. He sat next to me. I said, "let me take one last walk around the house and make sure we need to go." All of a sudden, it was like something came over me and I knew we had to go to the hospital. I think the hesitation at the time was the cost involved. We sat in the car wondering what hospital to go to. We are a little naive when it comes to those things, so Scott called the ER to make sure they took our insurance. We had only had health insurance for a little over a month at that time. I had gotten it when I started working at my job in June. It was the first time we had insurance our entire marriage, and I was glad for it. But, since we didn't know a lot about ER visits and insurance, Scott wanted to make certain they would take it. Well, come to find out, the ER can't refuse you. At 11:00pm we were on our way.

When we arrived at the hospital there was a bit of a wait. They take the sickest people first. I said my pain was at a 7. I guess I wasn't that sick to them. They took my temp, my urine and my vitals. Then we waited. And we waited. And we waited. We felt for a grandmother and her sick little grand daughter who sat a few chairs away. And, we watched the Chinese gymnasts who were pretty amazing. At 2:30am and about seven potty breaks later they called me back. A really nice nurse came in to take a pregnancy test and other blood samples. Scott had to work the next morning at 7:30. Pretty sure that we were going to be headed back home that night, I finally told him to go out to the car and sleep. It was going to be a while.