Rollercoaster Day Part 2

I stared at the toilet paper with the blood on it and immediately yelled for Chris. "I'm bleeding." We both assumed the worst. Chris ran around finding me clothes to wear, we shoved the dog outside and headed to emergency.

The rollercoaster plummeted.

Basically I was told that we could wait to see a doctor but that they didn't have an ultrasound machine available so I'd probably just be sent home with a form to get a scan done the next day. The idea of going home wondering if I'd lost our baby was crazy to me.

The rollercoaster continued to fall.

We waited and waited in the halls of GCUH emergency department until we called my fertility doc's office and their after hours machine got us onto Pindara Maternity Unit. They called Swifty Swift at 8pm (bless him for answering) and he told me my only real option was to head to Pindara Emergency and see if they could do an ultrasound. With me sitting in a blur, poor Chris made the phone call. He stumbled through asking people whether there was a trans-vaginal ultrasound available then ran to get the car so we could race there.

We drove down a tiny side street that came to a dead end. We were trying to arrive before 9pm to save ourselves $40 on private hospital emergency fees. I jumped out of the car and started walking, feeling the blood drip out of me as I went. I made it in time only to have the slowest woman in the world fill out my paperwork. We would have to pay the full $295. I flashed back to my waddling through the dark alleyway on my own for nothing.

Before long I was in a bed with a cannula in my arm. Bloods were taken and we waited and waited to have an ultrasound done.

By the time I laid down on the table, with a young John Snow looking fellow at my side, I was shivering with cold and terror. I cautioned that he might not be able to see anything through the abdominal ultrasound as Swifty Swift hadn't that morning. John Snow joked about how Swifty Swifty was just a doctor and he confidently squirted jelly onto my belly. After a very quick search around, he tuned the sound on and asked "what does that sound like?"

"Ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum." A little baby heartbeat. 'Bub', as John Snow affectionately referred to it, was doing just fine. Its little heart was pumping away, just as it had been when we heard it that morning. It didn't seem remotely bothered by my bleeding. Or my waddling though dark alley waist night trying to find the hospital entrance so we could save a few bucks.

The rollercoaster tentatively began to rise again. Ever so cautiously.

After an Anti D injection thanks to my O-negative blood type, we were on our way. It was 1am. Nobody could tell me why I was bleeding, or when it might stop. The doctor left with the comforting words "come back if the bleeding becomes torrential" then we were out of there.

What a bloody day. Literally.

The next two days would be spent horizontal for the most part. Being upright seemed like gravity just asking for trouble. It was horribly stressful, still with some brown discharge, wondering if we were just delaying the inevitable.