Saturday, January 9, 2016

Pregnancy Scare Part 1--Is it a Kidney Stone?

I wanted to record what has happened over the last couple of days to me and how my testimony has grown because of it (the testimony will primarily be in Part 2).

It all started January 5th at about 3:30pm.  This whole pregnancy I had experienced pain/discomfort in my left hip, but not like this.  I decided that I would go lay down and take some Tylenol to see if that helped at all.

It did . . . at least a little bit.

My husband, Tony, was going to donate plasma for the first time and I didn't want him driving the 24+ miles back by himself after doing something like that (he had a pretty negative experience with donating blood).  So, I told him that I would come with him.  He drove down there and the longer we drove the more uncomfortable I felt.  The discomfort turned into pain within twenty minutes and I could hardly keep my eyes open.

I was like this for the last ten or fifteen minutes of the ride.  Tony asked what he could do, I asked if I could get a blessing.  In the blessing I was told that my pain would "subside until you have the chance to lay down".  It didn't go away until I started walking into the plasma center with Tony.  We were there for about four hours and I didn't feel any pain; I felt discomfort, but no pain.

We finally got home and I went to lay down and the pain came back.  I immediately took some Tylenol and said a prayer that this would all go away!  I, surprisingly, fell asleep rather quickly.  It was probably around 11:00pm when I actually fell asleep.

At 3:00am everything changed.

I woke up to some of the most intense pain I had experienced thus far.  I woke Tony up and told him what was wrong.  The pain had spread from my left hip to across my lower abdomen and up into my rib cage (all on the front and side on my left; there was no pain in my back).  We figured it had been a while since I had taken any Tylenol so it was safe to take more.  I was in tears!  I was scared because I didn't know what this was, I was worried about Emma, and I was just in a lot of pain!

I fell back asleep, I think it was mostly because I was crying so much.  I woke up again around 5:00am with the exact same thing.  This time the pain was bad enough that I had actually started feeling nauseous and getting sick.  Tony ran upstairs and grabbed my Mom and she got a hold of one of our family friends who is a doctor and set up an appointment.

Mom took me to my appointment where we had a lot of different lab tests done: urine and blood.  The doctor asked me a lot of questions about what I was experiencing, pushed on my abdomen and tailbone, and then we listened to my sweet Emma's heart beat!  My Mom had never heard her heartbeat, so she was pretty excited to hear it!  The doctor talked us through his thought process--which I greatly appreciated--and gave us a few options of what it could be:

1. It could be a kidney stone/kidney infection.  But, in the urine there was no blood so that was a very unlikely option, or
2. It could be a strained ligament that runs from my rib to my groin area.

He felt like the second option was more likely what it was.  He gave me a prescription for some pain medicine and sent us on our way.  He was a total life saver that day!  He squeezed us in at the last moment and made us a top priority that day!  I am so grateful for doctors like him who really make his patients feel like they are taken care of.

I got home and started taking medicine, resting, and drinking lots of fluids!  The rest of the day I was feeling pretty good!  It hurt to move too much, but overall my pain level had gone back down to a 2 (on a scale of 1-10) when earlier it had easily been at a 6!  It made me really excited to think I was healing; I thought that it may have been just a one day thing.

Sadly, it was not...

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