On July 13th I posted the following Facebook status. Talk about foreshadowing...

Did I call it or what?!? Ha!


I'm sharing the following information so that other people can recognize the signs of ectopic pregnancy.

Turns out, if you have an ectopic pregnancy (or even a uterine pregnancy), you can still have your "period" [ I put it in quotation marks because even though it walked like a duck and talked like a duck...it wasn't a duck].

I had no reason to suspect that I was pregnant.

Looking back the only things that could have pointed to it were that I had stopped losing weight [I had been losing but had plateaued, I figured it was just normal weight loss pattern]. Four days before I was admitted to the hospital I was in the ocean, just about waist deep. A wave came up and slapped me and I got a sharp pain in my right side.  I thought it was very odd but chalked it up to a cyst, maybe. For about a week I had felt bloated, which was a really long time, but just thought it was some odd thing. The morning of the 14th, a couple hours before the pain started, I started bleeding.  This wasn't normal for me and the thought of a miscarriage crossed my mind briefly- even though I thought there was no way I was pregnant! 

There are several ways to "treat" ectopic pregnancies. If it's early enough, a drug can be given to stop cell growth and dissolve tissue . In my case, my fallopian tube was at risk of rupturing which can cause internal bleeding.  In these cases, surgery is necessary to save the life of the mother, and to repair or remove the tube.

Women who are at high risk for ectopic pregnancies are smokers, have had an STD that leaves scar tissue in the fallopian tube, and who have endometriosis.  I fall in this last category. You can learn more about endo here.  Doctors don't know the exact why and how of endo.  It can only be diagnosed with surgery, and treatments are limited and some have severe side effects.

We met with a fertility doctor [who flat out said that doctors don't know much about endo] in the winter and learned that women with endo have only a 3% chance of conceiving on our own. That's close to the odds of getting pregnant with birth control!  But at the same time, he had seen a woman in her 40's with stage 4 endo conceive on her own.

Don't worry, my next post won't be so medical :)

Life as of late has been challenging to say the least.

On July 15 Pete and I lost a baby.  The 14th we found out we were pregnant, and the 15th I underwent surgery where they removed our baby and my right fallopian tube.  

There is so much information surrounding these circumstances but the short of it is this: We went to the ER on the 14th thinking I had appendicitis or a cyst at the worst. It was there that we found out we were pregnant.  The next day I went into surgery thinking that I was two weeks pregnant and knowing that the baby was dying and that, even if it wasn't an ectopic pregnancy, they would be removing it. I woke up to find out that I had begun bleeding internally and that I was more like nine weeks pregnant.


I know that miscarriages aren't talked about very openly in our society.  I've always been a pretty open person.  This is the first time that I've found it harder to be open and share, but I think it's time and that this venue is appropriate.


I know that I am lucky. I am alive [ectopic pregnancies are life threatening if not "treated"]. I have friends and family to support me.  And much, much more. I know that this can be turned into a blessing and that good can come of it, because that's what God does. He takes crappy situations and teaches us through them.


I know that I could have been planning and preparing for this child and had a relationship with it for much longer and had a more difficult and different kind of heart break than what I've experienced/am experiencing.  And I can only imaging what that feels like. 


This has been a whirlwind of a month.  I'm still trying to heal physically as well as emotionally.  In under 24 hours we found out we were pregnant and then told that the pregnancy was failing and that they would need to operate. It was a lot to process.


Some may read this and think that at two or at nine weeks I shouldn't be referring to it as a baby.  But it was.  It was it's own person.  It had a soul. I don't believe the baby is an angel. I don't believe that it will come back to us again. It was it's own life, it's own unique soul. I don't question why this happened.  I know we didn't do anything wrong.

It feels so insensitive to say "it" instead of "him" or "her".  That is, unfortunately, one thing I regret- not having the forethought or knowledge to request/demand to know the baby's gender. So for now, that will have to do.


Like I said, there is so much information and things I want to share so that if anyone else goes through this they will do things [slightly] differently.  And I will write about these things in time.  This blog won't always be about this but the first few entries will be.


The first image is of me in the hospital. The second is of Pete and I on an impromptu Roberts Family Vacation in Maine only days earlier.