After a few hectic days I am finally at home recovering from my emergency surgery.

For those of you that don’t know what happened, I will give you the story. It all started 30 days ago...my period came as normal, but for some reason it never went away. After the 29th day, I decided to see the doctor because something didn’t quite feel right. After some poking and prodding she said it all appeared normal, but would do a sonogram just to make sure. At first glance, everything was okay, but then she noticed some abnormalities. First, she asked me if I’d taken a pregnancy test and I told her that I hadn’t and then she told me even worse news. She said that it looked like Ovarian Cancer. Yep, cancer. My heart stopped. I was SO freaked out.  The she said that it was rare for a women of my age to have ovarian cancer, so she thought it might be endiomitriosis or an ectopic pregnancy (google for the definitions). She said that I would need to have surgery on Monday.

I left the doctor’s office as freaked out as anyone would be and started to call people. First Adam, then my mom, and then my job (to let them know I wouldn’t be returning to work for a while).  Once Adam and I had time to calm down and think objectively, we started to call our friends.  One of our friends, Erin, who is an OBGYN told us that we should go ahead and take a pregnancy test just so we could rule out the ectopic pregnancy.  So, Adam and I drove to Walgreens and got a pee on the stick test and came home.  I took the test immediately and it was positive.  Yep, I’m pregnant.

I called Erin back and she said that I should let me doctor know asap and if I have ANY abdominal cramps I would need to go to the ER because an ectopic pregnancy is fatal.  At this point it was 11pm and we decided to call it a night and call the doctor first thing in the morning.  I woke up early and made the calls and found a doctor that was willing to see me on short notice. At Baylor Medical, we saw a doctor, Dr. Decker, who seemed to be pretty knowledgeable on all the scenarios. I explained to him all my symptoms and he told me that it sounded like a cyst.  He also told me that my pregnancy test came back negative. Yep, I’m NOT pregnant. 

I asked him if he could do a sonogram just so he could have the same data that my other doctor saw and he agreed. While we were waiting for the sonogram, my other Doctor, Dr. Lehman, called and told me that her blood work came back and I needed to head to the hospital ASAP because I was pregnant. Wait, what? This other doctor just told me I am not pregnant. How can that be? We told Dr. Decker what was going on and he said that he would have to wait for the blood work to come back before he could confirm a pregnancy so he advised us to sit tight and wait a couple hours for the results. In the meantime, we could do the other sonogram. So that is what we did. His sonogram showed no embryotic baby sacks, but it did show two very large cysts - one in each ovary.  He said that it was up to us whether or not we would want to do the surgery. He said that if it was his daughter, he would tell her to wait 6 weeks and see what happened before he did surgery. From his experience these cysts would go down and it looked like I probably had a miscarriage so there was no reason to think my fallopian tubes would rupture.

Okay, so am I pregnant or not? What is going on? Do I have surgery or wait 6 weeks? ugh. Let me just say that yesterday was a god-awful day.  So is the bleeding because of the cysts and is the baby actually perfectly healthy or is the baby causing the bleeding? Talk about too many unknowns.

Adam and I came back to the house to try to talk through this rationally. (Which wasn’t very easy because we had about a thousand phone calls coming in, including calls from the first doctor telling me to get to the hospital NOW).  After a 15 minute power-talk, Adam and I decided I should have the surgery, because pregnant or not, something was wrong. At this point it was 1:30pm and my surgery was scheduled for 4pm.  We rushed to the wrong hospital (Harris downtown) and then drove to the right one (Harris Southwest). We checked in and then were escorted to my room. I was asked to undress, remove all jewelry, and pee in yet another cup. Now, let me tell you that this was NOT easy. I had NOTHING to eat or drink and after the 5th time of peeing in a cup that day, I barely had anything in me.  The started the lab work (more blood drawn) and hooked up my IV.  Man, this is serious - I thought. I’ve never had surgery so let me just tell you that my lexapro was not working at this time.

I met the anesthesiologists, the hoards of nurses, and then finally said hello to Dr. Lehman.  My parents, Chris and Marylin, Stephanie and Charles, and of course, Adam were all there.  We waited and waited and then finally around 4:30 they let us know that the surgery was delayed until 5:30. (Oh, btw - at this time, we had just received a voicemail from Dr. Decker telling me that i WAS pregnant - approximately 6 weeks pregnant). At 5:45 the nurses came in and started up the drugs. Within about 5 seconds I was out. 

...surgery.sleep.drugs.more sleep.good morning.

I awoke around 11am the next morning to find out the details. Apparently I did have two cysts (1 drained, 1 left alone) and I was 6 weeks pregnant).  The baby was in the fallopian tube and had to be removed. (Sad, I know). 

Today has been quite an experience, I am on some pretty heavy drugs and I am in massive pain. It hurts to go to the bathroom, my throat hurts because of that freaking tube they put down your throat, and of course, I have incisions on my stomach.  Pain. Pain. Pain. The doctor said I would be back to normal in a few days and should be able to return to normal activity level fairly soon

As I am sure you can imagine, I am in a lot of physical and emotional pain right now. It’s been an avalanche of information to deal with in a short amount of time and then to deal with the joy of being pregnant and the sadness of a pregnancy lost. Of course I have the fantastic information of NOT having cancer (which to me was the scariest thing of all that came at me) and it doesn’t appear that I have any fertility issues, so in the event that Adam and I do decided to have children we shouldn’t have too many problems.  The only “bad” thing I’ve read at this point is that my chance of of a normal pregnancy is 50% - not the best news, but not the worst.  So, in the grand scheme of things, I will take that over the alternatives any day, I guess now is the time to really make sure I am keeping my body as healthy as ever so I don’t have to deal with another bad scare again. 

I realized I left out a very important part of the story. Adam and I weren’t really trying for kids, but we weren’t preventing it either. At the request of my doctor, I wanted to have a few normal cycles before actually getting pregnant and to help track my cycle I started taking my daily temperatures.  I was recommended to read a book called “Taking Charge of  Your Fertility” and followed the instructions on daily charting religiously. My neighbor, Anna, recommended the book and this came to be one of the most vital parts of my whole ordeal.  After the surgery, Adam asked Dr. Lehman why she was so adamant about having surgery that day when the other doctor thought I should wait 6 weeks. She said that if it hadn’t have been for my 3 months worth of chart data her diagnosis would have been the same as Dr. Deckers.  She said that because of my charts she was able to analyze the temperature fluctuations and really see what was going on in my body. She new exactly how far along I was just by my temps alone and new the severity of the situation. Uh, WOW. I can not believe that a simple step such as taking my temps in the morning could provide so much insight to a doctor. If it wasn’t for the charts, there could have been a much worse outcome - one we don’t even want to imagine.   So, I highly recommend this book to any women out there - my doctor was so thankful that I had gone through this process and was able to provide her with data that she would otherwise not have seen.