There is hope .... page 3

My name is Dawn and I am 26 years old. My husband, Matt, and I have been married since July 1998. All of my life, the occupation I wanted to be most was a mother.

We decided to start trying for a baby one year after marriage. We got pregnant right away on the first try in May 1999. I took an pregnancy test at the end of May which came out negative. However, I just knew I was pregnant. I took another one on June 1st and it came out positive. We were so thrilled! We told everyone!

I only had about five days of happiness when I began spotting. I was sent for ultrasounds and blood tests. The ultrasounds showed no baby or sac in the uterus and the blood tests were not doubling every other day like they should have. This went on for almost the whole month of June. Finally, on June 19 I started to have pain and called my doctor. All weekend she advised me not to go to the hospital and that I should just rest.

Well, on June 22 the pain was so incredible that I went against her advice and went to the ER. They said if I had waited any longer, I would have died. They had to do emergency surgery and found the baby was in my right tube. The tube had burst because the baby had grown so big inside it. I had lost so much blood. I was in the hospital for four days and on disability for six weeks. We named her Brittany Nicole. Needless to say, I immediately switched doctors when I got home from the hospital.

Well, all I wanted to do was get pregnant again. I was so scared that I wouldn't be able to get pregnant again and that if I did it would turn out to be another ectopic. My doctor knew I was anxious to try again so he told us to wait three months to try again. We got pregnant right away again in Sept. 1999 with only one tube! We had blood tests right away to verify that my numbers were doing what they were supposed to. Everything seemed good. I had no spotting!

Then, one morning on Oct 21, I woke up with one or two spots. My doctor had me come in for an ultrasound and we saw the baby in the uterus and we even saw his little heart beating. However, the doctor said the baby was really small and I probably wasn't as pregnant as I thought. (I knew that wasn't right). The doctor said the heart was beating so everything looked good.

I was overjoyed that this baby was in the uterus and had made it. The next morning I woke up with a lot of bleeding and lost my baby in the bathroom. We took him to the hospital and they examined me and said that I did not need surgery because everything had passed. We named him Issac David.

We don't know what sex either baby was but we felt we needed to give them names. I do not understand why this happened to my babies that I love so much, but I know that God is taking good care of them and I will see them someday. I am so thankful that I carried them for that short time even though I lost them, then to not have had them at all.

Well, the doctor told us to again wait three months before trying to get pregnant again but only two months later Nicholas David was conceived. Early blood tests looked good and we were able to see him on the ultrasound that he was safe in the uterus.

My whole pregnancy was uneventful and Nicholas was so healthy (9 pds. 2 oz.) when he was born on September 15, 2000, that he wouldn't fit through the birth canal and had to be delivered via c-section. He is the highlight and love of our lives. After my ectopic, I craved stories of other women who had ectopics and especially those who went on to have babies here on earth. I hope my story encourges someone else who is seeking this information.

My name is Amy and I am 24 years old and the mother of one beautiful baby girl. Up until about a year and a half ago, I had been on the birth control pill for quite sometime. After being on the pill for a while it is not uncommon to have very light periods or to completely miss one. So when that happened to me in the late summer of 2000, I thought nothing of it, but then the next one didn't come either. I had no symptoms of being pregnant, but I bought a home pregnancy test anyway. Imagine my shock when it was positive! After the initial shock, I became very excited, after all I'd always wanted children, I just hadn't planned on one at that particular moment. Since then I've learned pregnancy does not always go according to one's plans.

It was a Friday morning that I took the test. I called the doctor's office to see what to do next. They had me come in for a blood test, but being that it was Friday I wouldn't get the results until the following Monday. I hadn't planned on telling my boyfriend (now husband) until the doctor's office told me I was definitely pregnant, but he could see there was definitely something on my mind. I didn't want to lie and say there wasn't, so I told him. He was in disbelief and remained so until the doctor's office said it was true.

The nurse called me at work that following Monday and gave me the happy news, but it was followed by some troubling words. My HCG levels (pregnancy hormone) were much lower then they expected them to be based on when my last period had been. The doctor wanted me to go in on Thursday and repeat the test to see whether or not they were rising as they should. I tried not to panic or think bad thoughts, but I started reading about reasons for low HCG levels and for some reason my mind got stuck on the word ectopic.

What I hadn't shared with anyone up until this point was that I had a tender spot in my lower left abdomen. But I had never been pregnant before so I didn't realize this was abnormal. After reading about ectopic pregnancies, for some reason I immediately felt that this was what was wrong. I tried my very best to deny that feeling. I asked my sister and my mom if they had felt anything like that when they were pregnant. They both said no. I convinced myself that it could still be normal because every one is different. I decided to just wait until Thursday to see what the next test brought.

I went for the test on Thursday morning and this time the nurse called me with the results before the day was over. I guess they understood how emotionally taxing it is to wait. She had great news, my levels had done just as they were supposed to do. I was ecstatic! All that worrying was for nothing. I rationalized the initial low HCG levels by saying I was on the pill and since it failed there is really no telling when I became pregnant. And since my levels were fine now, I didn't even mention that low tender area.

I am working on my Bachelors degree part time in the evenings and that night I had to go to class. As I was sitting in the classroom that low tender area started throbbing. The pain ran through by the left side of my butt and down my thigh. It felt like an intense cramp, like I had exercised too much and had sore muscles. I tried stretching the muscles without being obvious. The pain in my lower abdomen had definitely gotten much worse, but I wouldn't allow myself to think of anything but the nurse's earlier words. Then when I got home, I went to the bathroom and there was a ton of bright red blood. I completely lost it. This wasn't fair. I had just been told a few hours ago that everything was fine. I had just let myself believe that I was actually going to have a baby. This couldn't be happening now. My boyfriend was trying to be a calming influence, but at that point nothing could have calmed me. I was absolutely hysterical. I called the after hours nurse line and they said they would have the on call doctor call me back. When she called she told me I would need to go in to see my doctor in the morning and have an ultrasound. Everyone was assuming I was having a miscarriage. I hadn't told anyone about the pain I was in. But just before the phone call ended, something made me tell her about it. I couldn't pretend anymore. I could hear the tone of her voice change as I described the one sided pain. She was extremely concerned. That just made me even more hysterical. She told me if it got any worse or if I started to bleed excessively to go to the emergency room. Throughout the night the bleeding almost completely stopped and again I let myself have hope that everything was going to be fine.

Friday afternoon came and I had my mother go with me to the doctor. I couldn't emotionally take going by myself and my boyfriend at the time had one of those jobs where you don't miss a day unless someone is dying and we didn't know how close I was to doing that. My doctor had me describe everything for her. The best way I could come up to describe it was that it felt like I had an open wound inside of me and something kept rubbing against it. It's eerie how accurate that description was. She sent me immediately for an ultrasound. The ultrasound tech didn't really say anything to me, which was complete torture. Why could she know what was going on with my body and baby, but I couldn't?! After the ultrasound I was sent back up to the doctor office to wait for results.

There was no more pretending. The doctor said they could not find anything in the uterus and they thought they could see a mass in my left tube, but they couldn't be certain. She gave me all my options, wait until Monday repeat blood test because my levels were on the borderline of whether they should definitely be able to see something in the uterus, so it was a possibility that it was just too early...if they were high enough repeat ultrasound and if the results were the same I could take a drug called Methotrexate...OR I could go in for exploratory laparoscopy that night. If nothing was wrong fine, but if it was, she would "fix it." She tried not to put any pressure one way or another, but after talking it through with her, I decided surgery was best. I made that decision basically because I couldn't stand the waiting and not knowing anymore. She was relieved at my decision because of the pain I was having. She said she would have been a nervous wreck all weekend worrying about me. That was really nice of her. So it was set, I was to return to the hospital at 7pm for surgery.

When I woke up from surgery in the recovery room, it took me a minute to get my bearings. The attending nurse told me that the baby and my left tube had been removed. I tried to cry, but I couldn't because it hurt my stomach. I didn't understand though, my doctor had said she would only need to make a small incision in my tube, she never told me it would be removed. The next morning when she came by she explained that my tube had begun to rupture and I was bleeding internally. Because of the condition of the tube, she felt it would be better to remove it then try to repair it and put me at further risk for another ectopic at the site of the repair. She also told me that my other tube looked healthy and she felt confident of my future ability to have children. I'm glad somebody was confident, because I sure wasn't.

I wasn't able to deal with the emotional pain for about a week after surgery because I couldn't cry without hurting my stomach. So I made myself numb for a while, but when decide to feel those feelings, it took a long time to learn how to cope with them. I don't know if I could've ever really healed if my doctor had been wrong. Thankfully though she was right. About 6 months after surgery I was pregnant again. This time my pregnancy resulted in the birth of my daughter! She is proof that there is life after an ectopic.