Ectopic Pregnancy

On the weekend my wife started having a few pains of the side of abdomen, and come Monday they were causing her to lose a lot of sleep and I think beginning to worry her too much.

Tuesday morning the pains were still there and she had decided to take my advice and see a doctor. First problem was our normal doctor was away on holidays and his associate wasn’t working Tuesday. So we had to ring around a few other places to see a doctor, and of course everyone is booked out, but we did finally manage to book in to see one at 12:30.

Our 12:30 appointment turned into a 12:50 appointment by the time we were seen to, but then I must say unlike our normal doctor there was no sense of urgency or hurry to get thru our appointment. I’m not sure if that’s because we were pregnant or it was our first time at this doctors practice or if it just their way of seeing patient.

The doctor couldn’t pin point what was causing my wife’s pain in the side and couldn’t rule out an ectopic pregnancy. An ectopic pregnancy is one where the baby is growing in a place it shouldn’t be like the ovaries or fallopian tubes. Ectopic pregnancies extremely rarely work out, and with a high risk to the mother they are generally aborted asap. Soon I think it’s fair to say both my wife and I were concerned from the time the pain started as we had read about ectopic pregnancies and had been warned by our doctor about them as well. The doctor rang the closest ultrasound place up to see if they could fit us in. So off we went to have an ultrasound.

Upon arriving at Queensland Diagnostic Imaging place, the receptionist told us we may be there a while as they try to squeeze us in. By this time it was about 2pm and my wife had started to drink lots of water which was a requirement for the ultrasound. Patients coming and going and my wife had drunk one and a half litres of water when the technician called her name. So it’s now 2:30pm and we walk into the room where the ultrasound takes place. The  technician gets the scanner out and starts moving it over y wife’s stomach and then says, you need to drink more water. So back out to the waiting room we go with another one and a half litre bottle of water for my wife to consume over the next 20mins.

At this point my wife is starting to feel a bit bloated and needing to go to the toilet for some relief. Now I hadn’t been to the toilet since before we left home and had been holding off since seeing the doctor hours ago. So I couldn’t help it when I lent over to my wife and said, “I’m just heading off to the toilet I’ll be back”. Too make things worse I couldn’t help but smile when I said that as I realised she was busting to go herself but couldn’t.

3:15pm and my wife and I called up for a second attempt at the Ultrasound. The technician start playing with all the dials and then says geez your bladder is a bit full now as a large black hole appears on the screen showing all the water my wife had drunk. The technician started to push the ultrasound scanner around on my wife abdomens and I could see on the screen a little blob. The technician then started to point out that the blob was actually our baby and that it was in the normal place so it wasn’t an ectopic pregnancy. 

The technician took a few measurements on the screen and said we were actually 8wks and 1day pregnant, 2 days more advanced than we thought. He zoomed in a little and turned the screen around a bit for my wife and we saw a little flashing light in the middle of the blob. “That’s your baby’s heart beating” said the technician. To which I had a big smile on my face.

With the ultrasound completed we rang the doctor the next day to see if we needed to come back in to discuss the results of the ultrasound or do more tests to see what was causing this pain. The doctor wasn’t concerned anymore with the ultrasound showing everything was good and other tests coming back good so the doctor just said to rest up and and monitor the pain. And as of now the pain seems to be subsiding so maybe it could just be my wife’s body preparing for the up coming few months.