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 :)