The Ectopiad, part II

Let it be known that Sunday is pretty much the worst day for any sort of medical problem to occur. I've been doing my OBGYN appointments at the big state/teaching hospital where my husband works, for the sake of convenience, so the on-call doctor for that Sunday was some 20-something resident who told me only to come in if I began bleeding enough to soak through a pad an hour. This was not the mental picture I wanted to have - in fact, I went ahead and decided for myself that I might go in to the ER if I were only soaking through, say, a pad every two hours. 

So I spent my day on the couch, reliving middle school and replacing my giant maxi pads as needed. I kept thinking the shedding of significant amounts of bright red blood was probably not the best way to begin a pregnancy, and watching "The Tudors" on Showtime On-Demand was probably not helping. Or maybe it was. I watched Natalie Dormer's Anne Boleyn writhe in a puddle of blood, clutching her sheets between her legs as if in a futile effort to keep it all in, and thought:

A. She's doing a pretty decent acting job here.

B. Well, at least no one's coming along to decapitate me after all this. 

Around 6 p.m. I became tired of not knowing what was happening to me. I was also tired of the increasingly anxious phone calls I was getting from my mother. So, despite the husband's moaning and groaning that the ER was a new, special ring of Hades, we went. We spent 6 or 7 delightful hours in the ER - an exam showed that my cervix was still closed, an ultrasound revealed nothing, as is the case when one is only 3-4 weeks pregnant (despite this test being almost guaranteed to be inconclusive, it was given to me anyway, probably because ultrasounds are so cheap). They took blood to check my HcG levels, and told me those levels would need to be checked again in two days for comparison. By the time we finally convinced someone to send us home, I was delirious, tired, hungry, and out of sanitary items. I was almost zombie-esque, standing in the doorway of our room, blood on my skimpy hospital gown, slowly kicking a stool back and forth for entertainment. 

Yes, I know - it's my fault for going to the ER instead of waiting for the clinic to open. By showing up in the evening, all my subsequent blood tests had to be done in the evening, guaranteeing me more needless and pricey ER trips for simple blood draws. But somehow, just being in the hospital, even when I was being driven nutrageous by the slowly grinding gears of the hospital machinery, (I waited 30-45 minutes for someone to come push me back to my room from the ultrasound room in a wheelchair, despite the fact that my own legs worked perfectly well. Also, the person being asked to push me had not shown up for their shift. So that went well.) made me feel as though as least someone was listening to me and would figure out what was going on. 

That bubble, eventually, was burst.