Monthly Archives: December 2015

Hospital: Our Theme of The Year Pt II

Written by on December 15, 2015 at 6:00 AM • 620 Words • Filed Under: Health & Beauty • 0 COMMENTS »

If you’re fallowing along, then you know that hospitals have been the theme of our year, but this time it involved the possibility of preterm labor.

The Road So Far Continued…

As it turned out, I wasn’t just meant to be a visitor at a hospital this year but also a patient. My luck, I know.

Towards the end of July, I had some pink spotting which had me worried, especially since we weren’t due for an ultrasound for another month. As a result after speaking with the on call doctor, I decided we should go to the ER, airing on the side of caution.

We went in and they conducted all the usually tests, blood pressure, cervix check, ultrasound, etc. We discovered that for the first time in my life I was hypertensive, likely due to the worry, the babies were doing just fine and I had a small SCH1 which is what was causing the bleeding.

I was advised that I was experiencing symptoms common to what is coined as a threatened miscarriage2 and while there wasn’t anything they thought I needed to be worried about, they still felt I should be aware and gave me a pamphlet with some info.

Let me just say, threatened miscarriage is terrible terminology and should be stricken from every medical employees vocabulary, but I digress.

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  1. subchorionic hematom ↩
  2. When bleeding, and occasionally abdominal pain, occurs but the pregnancy continues. Vaginal bleeding is relatively common during pregnancy among women who go on to have healthy births. ↩

Hospital: Our Theme of the Year

Written by on December 12, 2015 at 2:33 PM • 371 Words • Filed Under: Health & Beauty, Rants • 0 COMMENTS »

This has been a pretty rough year for us in terms of medically related issues. We’ve visited our fair share of medical facilities and had our fair share of admittance to hospitals for several days as well. To put it simply, Hospital was the theme of the year for us.

The Road So Far

In the beginning of April, R started experiencing severe chest pain. This resulted in a trip to the emergency room and his eventual admittance to the hospital for what we discovered was a flare up of his pericarditis which was initially diagnosed in April of 2011. The doctor also discovered a 6cm cyst had formed between his lung and the right side of his heart so he was admitted and observed, while pumped full of medications, looking for improvement.
Obviously he got better.

The doctors we saw initially were adamant that the cyst HAD to be removed, however, R decided he needed a second opinion because he didn’t want either of us going through the stress and recovery of unnecessary surgery, so he located another cardiologist recommended by colleague and this doctor, with 30 years of experience under his belt, seemed extremely confused as to why he was being recommended for surgery without an echo and stress test as a means to figure out if the cyst was actually impinging on his lung and heart.

All of this took place towards the end of April so we scheduled to have him evaluated in the beginning of May, but we never made it that far.

During the first week of May, R once again started to experience chest pain but it was not similar to the pain he had before. It was different and when we went to the ER that fated Monday night, he tried to explain that to the doctor but was ignored because they had a prior diagnosis. They assumed it was the same thing and sent him on his merry way, after pumping him full of morphine and writing another script for pain meds. Least to say, it didn’t work. He spent all of Tuesday in pain and had extreme difficulty around the house, symptoms that were completely different from those associated with pericarditis. The pain medication barely helped and he was completely miserable.

Finally, I decided enough was enough and on Wednesday morning, drove him back to the ER and refused to allow them to let us leave without some type of diagnosis or treatment plan that extended beyond pain medication. The doctors were stumped and kept reverting back to the prior diagnosis in April. They stated none of the tests or the X-Rays revealed anything else and wanted to send him home once again.

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Achievement Unlocked: Pregnant

Written by on December 9, 2015 at 6:00 AM • 633 Words • Filed Under: Health & Beauty, Relationships, Trying to Conceive • 4 COMMENTS »

This post has been a long time coming but with everything that’s been going on, R’s health issues, death in the family, Thanksgiving, etc. it’s not been high on the priority list. I spent the whole of November getting the house in order for Thanksgiving which included dinner for 21 people and absolutely 0 time on my desktop. In short, life has been insane.

As many of you know, R and I have been actively going through fertility treatments, specifically IVF to try to conceive. We both have our own share of issues but it was mainly MFI1 due to low sperm count, testosterone issues, and mild retrograde ejaculation. Basically, it means we CAN get pregnant but it would be immensely difficult for us to do so.

2014 was the year all of this was discovered as we finally had insurance that covered treatment and it took us the whole of the year to truly process the information. I had always suspected something must be wrong, nearly 10 years together without a single pregnancy is kind of indicative of that, but it wasn’t until I stopped menstruating for 3 months, with every test popping up negative when we decided it was time to find out for sure. All I can say for those in similar situations, teetering on indecision and fear, the sooner you know, the better. Time is of the essence and contrary to what they would like you to believe, there really isn’t enough of it.

We took a break in 2014 after discovering our issues and didn’t resume treatment until the beginning of this year. We went through a fresh cycle2 at the end of March which resulted in a chemical pregnancy3 and then R ended up back in the hospital for pericarditis which left very little time to process or deal with the loss, though on some level I understood that these things happen, and nature did what it was meant to, terminate a pregnancy that would not be viable.

Despite all that, we decided to jump right into our next cycle under the premise that if necessary, we would stop the cycle since all of our embryos are frozen and there was no obligation to continue since they did not have me on stims4. It wasn’t something we shared with anyone. We kept it to ourselves because we didn’t know what would happen, whether this round would be successful, and honestly the stress of so many people wanting to know everything but not necessarily willing to understand the process was too much for both of us. As much as I wanted to be open and honest about our journey, and while I tried to some extent, I wasn’t successfully in continuing and I learned that I’m perfectly okay with that.

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  1. male factory infertility related ↩
  2. Embryos implanted after retrieval without freezing. ↩
  3. A very early miscarriage that happened at a point that a missed period and biochemical tests, such as a HCG blood test or a home pregnancy test (checking HCG in urine), were the only evidence that you were pregnant. ↩
  4. Hormone therapy. ↩