A Happy Ending

I want to start off saying this post ends well. It's just wrong not to point that out.

Last Friday evening I started getting abdominal cramps. It was mostly in my lower back, like where my intestines are. I didn't think much of it because I've been having, um, issues with my intestines and I just figure it's one of those quirks of this particular pregnancy.

I still had the pain on Saturday, when I drove up with the kids to visit my mom. Around 1pm, I started bleeding. Very scary. And then I started to panic a little because I didn't know what to do. With Kaiser, I would call the nurses hotline and they would tell me what to do. But, there was no number to call Aetna and I didn't want to go to some random emergency room and be charged $10,000 for a 15 minute doctor visit.

So, I called Joanna, who had Aetna too and she verified that I don't need permission from anyone, just go. haha, I felt kind of silly. But, I had been dependent on Kaiser for so long and that's all I've ever known.

So, we went to the emergency and waited, and waited and waited. They needed to do a pelvic exam, so I was waiting for an empty room. After 2 hours, I asked the receptionist if she could find out how much longer it would be. She said "It's going to a long wait still because they're swamped back there."

Unbelievable.

So, we left. Having had a miscarriage before, I knew there really wasn't anything they could do except to check for a heart beat. It would have been nice to know at that point, but waiting in an emergency room with a 9 month old and 5 year old isn't all that much fun.

Fast forward to Sunday morning and I realized that I had stopped bleeding! There was nothing the whole night! And I was so tired Saturday night that I went to sleep at 8pm with Caleb. Good sign.

On Monday morning I made an appointment with my doctor for Wednesday. And I headed home with the kids. Shortly after we got home, I got a call from the doctor's office. She had seem my paperwork and wanted to see me that day. So we went in after all her appointments were done.

She found the baby quickly and I saw the heart beating right away. She measured it and it was beating at 167! Perfect! We saw it move too! And saw the arm buds! It's actually measuring a few days bigger. The baby is perfect!

So what the heck happened? Well, on my visit, two weeks ago, she saw some blood stuck in between my uterus and the placenta. She said that it would probably get absorbed into my body. She didn't tell me at the time, but she thought the other possibility was that I was going to have a miscarriage. Turns out there was a third option that she hadn't thought of, which is what happened. The blood manuevered it's way out.

I'm so glad that she say me yesterday instead of having to wait until Wednesday. It's really nice to have one doctor taking care of me.