Angel
Down with this sort of thing
- Joined
- Aug 13, 2006
- Messages
- 7,598
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- 365
HOSPITAL!!!
Ok, so no one noticed but I disappeared for about a week and here's why - and it's a good one!!
Right - up until recently only Albion Knight here knew that I became pregnant last month but was feeling quite ill - hence my last longish absence from the boards - sadly I lost the baby and was put on a course of antibiotics as I was still in a lot of pain. Two weeks later, I kept getting lots of intense abdominal pain low on the tight hand side of my body and kept being sick but in true Angel fashion, I refused to see a doctor. All came to a head on Sunday night when I was fine one minute and then doubled over the next. After spending an hour curled up in a ball on the bathroom floor I decided perhaps a doctor wouldn't be such a bad idea after all and called NHS Direct, which is a wicked little service here in the UK which you can use rather than going to the emergency room and waiting for hours only to be told to go home and sleep.
Anywho, they called an ambulance and off I was rushed to hospital, being sick and unable to straighten up. Steve came with me and was able to get me to the front of a long queue of sick people to be seen first...and they had no idea what was wrong with me. After many unpleasant injections, scans and lovely internal examinations
they admitted me to the emergency assessment unit and hooked me up to an IV...during the night my stats went up and down rather worryingly so they called in an anaesthetist to prep me for a possible appendectomy, which was one of their guesses as to my condition.
So - they moved me to another ward and made me sign all these forms for surgery because they wanted to do exploratory laparoscopy (cameras and weirdness) to find out the problem. Once I was settled, Steve had to go back home and I was left with four other women who turned out to be absolute lifesavers later on...
I was woken up by my surgeon who told me that he didn't want to operate as I seemed stable and said I might not even need surgery because the pain had subsided (those hospital issue drugs are AWESOME!!). I was happy with that and he said he'd see me in the morning. The next morning, one minute I was fine and the next I was racked with pain. The nurses gave me pain killers but I just threw them up and then tried to go to the bathroom. Once I came out, I felt really dizzy and according to the other patients, I went a weird colour and couldn't open my eyes properly...next thing I knew, I'd collapsed and couldn't breathe properly. All the other patients came running, helping me up and trying to get me to breathe and then about eight doctors and nurses rushed up and got me into bed. Five needles and a bottle of oxygen later and I was told I needed emergency surgery immediately. I was a bit out of it by this point but my friends on the ward told me later that my surgeon himself came and sat with me until I went into surgery and when I came out he remained by my bed until I came around and Steve arrived.
I felt like crap when I came round and was on loads of morphine which didn't touch the pain but made me talk rubbish - I don't hardly remember Steve being there at all. The next day, the surgeon came to see me and was quite excited as he had recently written and published a paper on problem pregnancies and said they had found an ectopic pregnancy when they opened me up which meant that I had been pregnant with twins, not just one baby. The chances of this are 1 in 30,000 and it is so rare that no one in the hospital had ever seen it apart from my surgeon. The problem was that I hadn't been a textbook case and that was why they didn't take me for surgery immediately - and it wasn't until another doctor arrived that I found out just how serious everything was.
Basically, I had two eggs fertilised at the same time (rare in itself) and whilst one tried to grow in the right place, but died, the other got stuck and tried to grow ectopically. No one expects twins to be be in two different places, so they didn't think it was a second baby - when I collapsed on the ward and couldn't breathe, it was because the tube carrying the baby exploded and started to drown me with my own blood - nice. They had to drain off over three litres of blood before they could even operate and I needed two blood transfusions. They removed my right ovary and fallopian tube too. Had I waited any longer to come into hospital or had they not done the surgery when they did, I'd be dead, basically - so I'm lucky to still be alive by all accounts.
I spent another two days in hospital on various drips and drains but got released today...everything was done by keyhole surgery so no scars once the stitches dissolve in 6 weeks time and my surgeon wants to write this up as my condition was nothing like anything anyone had seen before, so I'm kind of a cross between a freak of medical science and a celebrity :lol:
Gotta take it easy and see them again in 6 weeks but otherwise I'm doing ok...a little freaked out, a little emotional but that'll take time too, I guess. Just glad to be home and glad to still be alive - had I been any older and they might not have been able to save me, according to my other doctor.
Ta.
Ok, so no one noticed but I disappeared for about a week and here's why - and it's a good one!!
Right - up until recently only Albion Knight here knew that I became pregnant last month but was feeling quite ill - hence my last longish absence from the boards - sadly I lost the baby and was put on a course of antibiotics as I was still in a lot of pain. Two weeks later, I kept getting lots of intense abdominal pain low on the tight hand side of my body and kept being sick but in true Angel fashion, I refused to see a doctor. All came to a head on Sunday night when I was fine one minute and then doubled over the next. After spending an hour curled up in a ball on the bathroom floor I decided perhaps a doctor wouldn't be such a bad idea after all and called NHS Direct, which is a wicked little service here in the UK which you can use rather than going to the emergency room and waiting for hours only to be told to go home and sleep.
Anywho, they called an ambulance and off I was rushed to hospital, being sick and unable to straighten up. Steve came with me and was able to get me to the front of a long queue of sick people to be seen first...and they had no idea what was wrong with me. After many unpleasant injections, scans and lovely internal examinations
they admitted me to the emergency assessment unit and hooked me up to an IV...during the night my stats went up and down rather worryingly so they called in an anaesthetist to prep me for a possible appendectomy, which was one of their guesses as to my condition.So - they moved me to another ward and made me sign all these forms for surgery because they wanted to do exploratory laparoscopy (cameras and weirdness) to find out the problem. Once I was settled, Steve had to go back home and I was left with four other women who turned out to be absolute lifesavers later on...
I was woken up by my surgeon who told me that he didn't want to operate as I seemed stable and said I might not even need surgery because the pain had subsided (those hospital issue drugs are AWESOME!!). I was happy with that and he said he'd see me in the morning. The next morning, one minute I was fine and the next I was racked with pain. The nurses gave me pain killers but I just threw them up and then tried to go to the bathroom. Once I came out, I felt really dizzy and according to the other patients, I went a weird colour and couldn't open my eyes properly...next thing I knew, I'd collapsed and couldn't breathe properly. All the other patients came running, helping me up and trying to get me to breathe and then about eight doctors and nurses rushed up and got me into bed. Five needles and a bottle of oxygen later and I was told I needed emergency surgery immediately. I was a bit out of it by this point but my friends on the ward told me later that my surgeon himself came and sat with me until I went into surgery and when I came out he remained by my bed until I came around and Steve arrived.
I felt like crap when I came round and was on loads of morphine which didn't touch the pain but made me talk rubbish - I don't hardly remember Steve being there at all. The next day, the surgeon came to see me and was quite excited as he had recently written and published a paper on problem pregnancies and said they had found an ectopic pregnancy when they opened me up which meant that I had been pregnant with twins, not just one baby. The chances of this are 1 in 30,000 and it is so rare that no one in the hospital had ever seen it apart from my surgeon. The problem was that I hadn't been a textbook case and that was why they didn't take me for surgery immediately - and it wasn't until another doctor arrived that I found out just how serious everything was.
Basically, I had two eggs fertilised at the same time (rare in itself) and whilst one tried to grow in the right place, but died, the other got stuck and tried to grow ectopically. No one expects twins to be be in two different places, so they didn't think it was a second baby - when I collapsed on the ward and couldn't breathe, it was because the tube carrying the baby exploded and started to drown me with my own blood - nice. They had to drain off over three litres of blood before they could even operate and I needed two blood transfusions. They removed my right ovary and fallopian tube too. Had I waited any longer to come into hospital or had they not done the surgery when they did, I'd be dead, basically - so I'm lucky to still be alive by all accounts.
I spent another two days in hospital on various drips and drains but got released today...everything was done by keyhole surgery so no scars once the stitches dissolve in 6 weeks time and my surgeon wants to write this up as my condition was nothing like anything anyone had seen before, so I'm kind of a cross between a freak of medical science and a celebrity :lol:
Gotta take it easy and see them again in 6 weeks but otherwise I'm doing ok...a little freaked out, a little emotional but that'll take time too, I guess. Just glad to be home and glad to still be alive - had I been any older and they might not have been able to save me, according to my other doctor.
Ta.
*hugs!*
