It was Wednesday 6 March when I got a positive pregnancy test. I remember shouting with a joyful energy “it say’s positive!”, and my husband and I had the most comforting and warm hug, it felt like the one we had when we got married.
After losing my mother I’ve struggled to believe in my luck, but meeting my husband challenged that narrative and this news continued in the same vein. However, within 24 hours things started feeling strange.
I read that some bleeding can be common during pregnancy, but something did not feel right. As the days continued, I also started experiencing some abdominal pain on my left side. I came across the websites of The Ectopic Pregnancy Trust and the Miscarriage Association and said to myself: “this is what I’ve got.”.
The pain wasn’t unbearable, but it was there, so I was booked for an early ultrasound scan but had to wait for ten days because it was too soon to see anything. After a week, the pain got worse, and I went to the emergency department. I was treated like an anxious wreck, but I also understood that I wasn’t seen as an emergency. They did some observations and I saw a lot of blood that stunned me. I was told to spend the night there because of being in pain but then in the next breath I was told to leave. I requested to stay because I was scared I might rupture, and I slept on a chair. Two doctors said: “it doesn’t look like an ectopic pregnancy” and “that my pregnancy hormone levels were high”. They couldn’t scan me because they didn’t have sonographers working on Fridays. I was told that this blood and pain could be part of being pregnant, an early miscarriage or an ectopic pregnancy. Everything was possible at this stage.
Three days later, I had my scan, nothing was found but my hormone levels were still hovering in the 100’s. I asked the consultant again: “is this an ectopic pregnancy?”, “No, I don’t think so”, she said. I felt like I was going mad. I had a strong instinct that this was a left sided ectopic pregnancy, but my situation was labelled as Pregnancy of Unknown Location.
We had a trip planned for a few days, the doctor signed me off and said to do a pregnancy test in two weeks. It felt like I had a ticking time bomb in my body. I read up on ectopic pregnancy cases to try to bring some sanity to my potential madness, but reading was also having a detrimental effect on my mental health. Not knowing what was going on in my body felt like one of the most challenging experiences of my life. I was in an unknown country with a pregnancy that had an unknown location. The pain started getting worse, so we decided to travel back earlier, and I was still testing faintly positive for a pregnancy. I was angry that I couldn’t even enjoy our trip, and started thinking that I was cursed. We landed and went back to the emergency department as I felt the pain was increasing and I saw a male doctor that helped me calm down. My hormone levels had dropped, and he prescribed me some pain relief.
I contacted the Early Pregnancy Unit again; this was my fifth blood test in two weeks. I was mentally and physically exhausted. A nurse said to me: “mira tus brazos”, meaning look at your arms in Spanish because they were like pin cushions. We had a long conversation in our native language, and she gave me a hug. She had my mum’s name, it felt that my mamá had sent this person from the stars to look after me.
My hormone levels were still under 100 but I kept getting mixed messages like: “it’s unlikely that it will rupture” and also, “it can certainly rupture”, and they still couldn’t confirm the diagnosis. I got tired of this lack of clarity and the waiting game took a toll on me. The doctor told me to come back in a week for another ultrasound scan, but I begged her to book me in sooner as I was in pain and the hormone levels weren’t going down. My Latin side came out very strongly and she ended up booking me for a scan with the lead of the pregnancy unit for 48 hours time.
She confirmed a 9mm mass on my left side and said that the hormone levels were going down, so I was put on expectant management. I said to her: “I knew it”, with a broken voice. The fear of rupture felt very present, so I asked her twice if she was sure of doing this. My brother kindly booked me an online consultation with a doctor from back home to get a second opinion, and he agreed with this ‘conservative approach’ so that relaxed me (a bit). Before I went to bed, I would say to myself every day: “I made it through today”. I was just surviving. I was told to get a blood test after a week to monitor the hormone levels.
After a few days, the pain started to get worse, but I was told that it could be because of the pregnancy resolving itself. My mind struggled to assess the severity of the pain and I was also losing patience. I got scared as I felt a strong pain in my abdomen in the afternoon and a dull pain in my left shoulder. My whole arm felt numb, and I had pins and needles, so I was admitted in the gynaecology ward for a night. While my hormones were going down, the size of the mass was still the same. The sonographer told me “It should be reduced by now” but confirmed there was no internal bleeding or rupture. After talking to a doctor, they said that it takes time for the mass to reabsorb (sometimes weeks or even months).
With these mixed messages, but in this chaos, I saw a familiar face, and it was the same nurse again, which felt comforting. She said that she has been following my case, and those words made me emotional. After two days, my hormone levels were negative for pregnancy. When the doctor said: “the ectopic pregnancy is finished”, I burst into tears. Five weeks and three days of living in a nightmare. I was so grateful that I was physically safe and that I had both Fallopian tubes, but I knew that my emotional recovery would take time.
It was incredibly hard to find stories of successful expectant management which made me feel even more lonely. I suffer from IBS (Irritable Bowel Syndrome) so the discomfort in my abdominal area made it difficult to understand what was going on. Waiting was the only option. Freedom can sometimes feel like an illusion but my love for my husband was the only thing that gave me hope.
I would always be forever grateful to my friends in the UK and from back home, my brothers, my therapist, and of course, my partner and my mum’s love. I’m here writing this thanks to their support and care. I only hope that my story can help other women to feel a little bit less lonely as reading others helped me to go through one of the most difficult experiences in my life. I don’t know if this end does its justice, but I’m truly amazed by the female body.
Thank you to Maria for sharing her experience. If you would like to share your experience of ectopic pregnancy, please visit our guide for more information.
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