I Hope You Never Experience This

I was in the midst of writing some posts to share the wonderful news that I was pregnant when I had to stop and hit delete. 
Instead I'm writing this post. A post that may not be for you - the people who may still have me on their feeds, but for the people who search for specific terms to find it. Although there are some similar posts out there, I couldn't find any that were exactly or, in some cases, anywhere close to what I'm going through right now. I want to be able to bring my story to others in case they need it. 
I know I'm being a bit vague, so let me clarify a bit.
On January 23rd after a couple of days of cramping but with Aunt Flo (AF) not showing up I thought I would take a pregnancy test. We had been trying for just over 3 months at that point. The test came back very positive. Two beautiful pink lines (and then blue, then a cross, then a "pregnant") came back. 
I was having very irregular periods right after coming off of birth control. I had a 22 day cycle, followed by 41 days, and on my third cycle I ovulated on day 41. I was surprised that I got a positive test so quickly (although my mom always told me that the women in her line are very fertile!). 
I quickly made a doctor's appointment on the 29th which confirmed I was indeed pregnant but it was very early. A couple of weeks later I went back for a dating ultrasound which placed me at 6w5d and a due date of October 6th. We saw a heart beat at this appointment (although it was too soon to hear). 
We told few people about the pregnancy in fears of having a miscarriage, but it was not something we actually thought would happen. Especially since we saw the heartbeat and the chances of miscarriage at that point are so low. 
By that point I had started to have morning sickness, my smelling abilities increased, and my skin was super oily. My stomach was bloated and I looked pregnant. I didn't gain much weight even though I was eating a lot more than normal. 
However, somewhere around 8 weeks my morning sickness disappeared. I knew that this was perfectly normal, but as the next 2 weeks went on I began to grow anxious. I mentioned to my husband that I didn't feel right. That something was off. I didn't have any symptoms. I even emailed my doctor on the 11th of March with my worries. She wasn't in, but a nurse said that since I hadn't had any cramping or blood/spotting that everything was most likely fine and to keep drinking a lot of water. 
I want to say that I wish I had gone to the doctor, but it's not as though anything could have been done at that point anyway. The end had already happened. 
On March 15th I had a monthly appointment with a midwife to do a physical and listen for the heartbeat I was 10w5d at that point (so exactly 4 weeks after my initial dating ultrasound). My husband said I could let my mom go with me to this appointment since we had been told it was just a physical and no ultrasound would be done 
The midwife took information and then said that it was too early to listen for the heartbeat so that we would do an ultrasound. I was excited because I knew that at this point the baby would look like a baby and not just a peanut. 
The midwife started with an abdominal ultrasound and then said my bladder was too full. Which confused me since I was under the impression that for an abdominal ultrasound you needed a full bladder (you do). That should've sent me me warning signals immediately. But what did I know? Maybe I was wrong. She sent me to empty my bladder and told me we would do a vaginal ultrasound (which I don't find uncomfortable at all). 
I was still excited at this point, in hindsight I see that she knew what she was (or, really, wasn't) going to see but was hiding it. And this is what is really bothering me now. But, alas it makes no difference now. But it did make me not want to deal with midwives in the future - I'll stick to OBGYN's. 
I will continue this.... 

Ramblings About... My Miscarriage

Exactly 1 week ago (fromt the time I write this) I was finding out that my baby had died inside of me. I have always wanted to have a baby and life has made it so that I finally got pregnant on January 13th, 2016. I found out 10 days later and I saw my baby on an ultrasound on February 16th, 2016. 

My husband and I have been married nearly 2 years, together for over 4. It was time to start since I am already in my 30’s (he is 6 months younger than me). 

I was so extatic when I saw the two lines giving me a positive pregnancy test that I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know how to hold it in. I had to yell it out loud. But I played it cool and when my husband walked into the room a few minutes later I shoved the little sitck in his face. I took 3 or 4 tests one right after the other to make sure I wasn’t seeing things. They were all very positive. 

We called and made the appointment to see the doctor and there was no going back. I had a little baby growing inside of me. You may call it a zygote or embryo or whatever, but to me, from the moment I saw those two lines it was MY BABY. Our baby. Something we created. I knew life would change but we were ready for it. We have tons of family support (and even some nudging that it’s time to have kids) from both sides. 

Now, with the baby gone. No heartbeat and the baby not having grown past 7 or so weeks, we have nothing and I feel so completely empty. 

I knew it was coming, too. I don’t know how, because I was the one that kept telling my husband that the probability of miscarriage was low since we had seen the heartbeat. But somewhere around 8 to 9 weeks my symptoms disappeared seemingly overnight. I know that symptoms can go away. I wasn’t worried immediately, but as time went on I just felt like something was wrong. 

I expressed this to my mom and my husband who reassured me that everything was fine. I wasn’t bleeding, I didn’t have cramps. There were no signs that anything was wrong. 

If would we knew. Well, nothing would have changed other than I would have had had to carry my baby, already without life, for 3 weeks and 3 days inside of me. I think that is what is painful. That the poor baby was inside of me without anyone knowing he was dead. 

Who am I kidding, there are so many things that are painful about this (and I’m sorry that this is just a rambling post, but I have to get out what’s in my head in whatever way it comes). 

I though, beforehand, that the worse part would be giving birth to the baby. It was, but not the physical pain. The cramps weren’t worse than I had experience in normal periods. The emortional pain of knowing that my baby was sitting in the toilet and would just be discarded is what really got to me. 

Logically I know all the reasons: it’s better this way, God had other plans, he probably had chromosomal defects that prevented him from growing so that he wouldn’t suffer. Mother nature knows best, my body knew what to do. 

None of that matters. My baby is dead and I will never hold him in my arms. I’ll never know what it is to hold my first child. When people ask me how many kids I have (if I am able to have kids, that’s a whole other post) I’ll have to mention that I lost my first. Which I am not ashamed to do. But I know that people won’t know how to react to my statement. I will make them uncomfortable. 

I am struggling. I push through each day, but I have to hold the tears back. I’m back at work (I can’t take more time off). People here know what happened, but no one approaches me. Almost like I’m this weird thing that they don’t know how to deal with.

Wednesday Wishes

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about my health so today’s Wednesday Wishes have to do with them.

My health tends to always be on my mind since I’m always in some sort of pain and trying to think of a solution. There are no solutions to the pain it seems.

(Quick background for all my new readers: I broke 5 ribs in July 2012 but we don’t know why or how. No accident, nothing. My blood results and bone density/scans were all good. I was in pain for a year before they figured it out. Now it seems that there is permanent nerve damage in my rib area which I am being drugged up for).

I have an appointment with my pain management doctor on the 10^th. The medicine I take requires I come in to see her every 3 months. Luckily I don’t worry too much about the medicines I take. My worries lie in the fact that I still have very painful days.

The bigger worry is that the medicines I take are not compatible with pregnancy. Which means that when Thomas and I decide to start trying (and if I get pregnant accidently) I have to stop taking the medicine. I depend on the medicine to not be crippled in pain. I’m still in pain with the medicine, without it I can’t function.

What will happen when I get pregnant and can’t get through the day? I worry about having to take time off work in order to make it through the pregnancy. I worry about the fact that it would mean that we would have less income coming in. (I have to look into getting Aflack or Colonial Life for supplemental insurance to cover this period, but that is a monthly cost).

On a different health note – for the past six months to a year, whenever something happens in my life – whether it is buying a car or now refinancing my house – I get what I think are tension headaches. For some reason I always leave my Excedrin at home and Tylenol does nothing to subdue the pain.

So my wishes for today are that my health improves. I wish that the hormones that pregnancy brings will help with the pain and I’ll be able to work and have a nice pregnancy. I wish that I can eventually wean off some of the medication. I wish that this headache side effect to life events goes away, they suck!

What are your wishes today?

Ribs O Pain

I was going to write about my week today but I need to feel sorry for myself for a little bit. This is a long post, and it deals with my chronic pain and my fears of being able to be pregnant. I’d appreciate you reading it, but I understand that there are a lot of words and nothing in ways of pictures. 

I know that there are many, many people who are dealing with a lot more pain than I am. But that does mean that my pain doesn’t matter. It does. 

I’ve always had upper back pain. Okay, not always, but from about the age of 14. I’m a couple of months away from my 30^th birthday now. That pain, though, would be strong some days and less severe other days. I was prescribed a muscle relaxant that I would take when the pain got to be too strong for me. I remember that from about 6/2014 2012 and before I was maybe taking it once a month. 

Then in July 2014 I got hurt. I don’t know how, exactly, though. The only thing I remember is zipping up a dress and feeling pain down my arm. I thought I pulled a muscle or something. Nearly a year later I found out that I had broken 5 ribs on my right side. During that year I was in so much pain I didn’t want to do anything. Towards the fall I couldn’t get up or lay down without help. I had to lay on my right side to have some type of relief.  The doctor’s I went to told me it was just inflammation and to take some anti-inflammatory medication – which never seemed to help. 

Finally in May 2013 a doctor at my new insurance through Kaiser ordered me an x-ray, which revealed 3 broken bones. An MRI (or was it CT scan?) later on revealed 2 other broken bones.  

I got the call at work and started to cry. I wasn’t imagining the pain after all! There was a reason that I felt stabbing pain under my right breast. 

Then came another problem. Why was I still in pain if my initial injury was nearly a year earlier?  

After seeing different doctors, having scans, blood work, and countless other things done I was given the sad news: if you’re still in pain you will probably always be. It’s unlikely it will get better. 

The bones had healed somewhat. They are still healing now, though, 2 years later. So the pain that I feel now is not the broken ribs, but the result of the ribs being broken. 

Nerve damage. The doctor explained that when the ribs broke they probably damaged the nerve that runs from the spine in between the ribs. While nerves do heal, they should have healed by now. 

So the answer is medication. I’m on a nerve pain medicine called Gabapentin. I’m at the highest dosage (800mg, 3 x a day) and I’m taking Tramadol along with it twice a day. 

I’m still in a lot of pain. I feel it all the way from under my right breast to my back. Sometimes, when the pain is more unbearable than other times, I take a Norco instead of the Tramadol. But I’m afraid that I’m hurting myself taking so many medications.

The last few days the pain has been worse than it has been (maybe the adrenaline of the wedding and honeymoon masked the pain?) and so I started thinking about when I have kids. 

When Thomas and I decide that we want to have a baby I will have to be taken off the Gabapentin. It’s not compatible with pregnancy. Thinking about this makes me cry. I want more than anything to be pregnant and have babies, but how can I do that if my body doesn’t agree with it? If my body will betray me and give be so much pain that I can’t handle being pregnant. 

I’m so afraid of not being able to have my own children. I worry about our finances. While I won’t lose my job (a positive of being a government employee), I only have so much paid time off, and it’s nowhere near enough to cover 9 months off. 

If you’ve read this, thank you. I needed to get it off my chest. I needed to talk about it. 

Pregnancy Fears

I don’t plan on becoming pregnant for at least another 2 years, but like most women in their late 20s I’m thinking about what it will be like. I’ve never feared pregnancy until this year when I realized that my pain will not be going away. What I didn’t talk about in my post explaining my broken ribs and damaged nerves was that it has resulted in my inability to lift or carry heavy things. While I can work around this on a day to day basis – my fiancée can carry grocery bags, I can use a cart, or have someone help me – the fear I have is what will happen when we do decide to get pregnant.

The medication I take for the pain cannot be used during a pregnancy. At all. I have to go off of it once we decide it is time to become parents. If I’m in pain under maximum dosages of 2 medications what will happen once I have to go off of it for what I imagine will be a year or more (I don’t know if I would have to be off it during breast feeding). There is hope of course. Sometimes the hormones that are produced during pregnancy can help alleviate pain (or so Dr. Miles/Pain tells me).

Sometimes I joke about it and having a surrogate. But that isn’t what I want. I want to carry my own baby and I want to do it without any pain that isn’t directly related to the pregnancy itself. I guess you could say I am disappointed in myself, in my body.

Then, of course, will be the issue of carrying my baby once she or he is born. Even on the medication if I carry something heavy I am left in more pain the next days (depending on how heavy it is and for how long I carried it). Lifting my nephew sometimes triggers it (although he is 5 years old). To that end, though, I’d rather be in pain and be able to hold my child and pick them up when a cuddle is needed than to forgo it all.

Only time will tell.

/end sad post

The Accident That Wasn't

This is a long post describing something I’ve been going through for a couple of years now. It chronicles my experience with an injury and the pain that has remained because of it.

Let’s take a trip back in time to July 2012 when the simple act of zipping up a dress has changed my everyday life – and not for the better.

I was at my local Kohl’s shopping with my mom, something I typically do on the weekends. I found a dress that I liked and took it into the fitting room to try on. It had a zipper on my left hand side so I reach across my body with my right arm to zip it up. Let me pause her to explain that my chest is rather large so it’s not such an easy thing to reach across to zip something up. As I zipped it up I felt a strain and then tingling down my right arm but I disregarded it for the moment to admire myself in the mirror. The dress looked much better on the hanger than it did on me.

I left the fitting room and found my mom to whom I complained that my arm had been tingling and my side hurt. I assumed that I had pulled a muscle or at least strained one. Never being a sporty person I didn’t know what this felt like but I imagined that it felt like that. I turned to Facebook and Google to inquire about my pain. The pain eventually subsided enough that I didn’t think about it, but it did come back. It came back with such force that I couldn’t lift or even open doors with my right hand. At the time I was working as a receptionist and part of my job was to make coffee in the morning – this became a difficult task for me. Even writing tired my arm out. I had been dealing with the pain for Aleve/Motrin/Tylenol – anything that might help.

Years earlier I had been given a prescription for Tramadol for chronic upper back pain (without diagnosis). I took it very sparingly because it is a narcotic and very strong. Also, it did give me some side effects including making me drowsy. I usually only took it at night although it did cause me to wake up in the middle of the night and be wide awake for an hour or so.  The pain during the summer and fall of 2012 got extreme enough that I started taking the Tramadol at work and working through the drowsiness. I was in a lot of pain.

I had started working as a receptionist in April 2012 so my health insurance kicked in around July or August. That is when I was finally able to go to see a doctor and inquire about my pain. I explained what had happened to her and she diagnosed it as costocondritis  - an inflammation of the areas between the ribs. Thissounded possible so I took her advice of taking anti-inflammatories. I began taking the maximum dosage recommended from a prescription for Motrin. It did little to calm the pain. A Sunday sometime that fall I was in so much pain that Thomas couldn’t take it anymore. My usual relief of just laying my right side wasn’t doing much to help me and I had given up on taking Motrin since it didn’t help. Thomas grabbed my hand took me to Urgent Care.

Like most everyone, I had heard of doctor’s who really didn’t care but I hadn’t really ran across one to that point. This doctor made me feel so horrible I began sobbing uncontrollably (although I am a crier, a BIG crier). She also assumed that the reason for my pain was costocondritis and said that they couldn’t do x-rays because inflammation cannot be seen in x-rays.  She then proceeded to accuse me of being there to get drugs. I told her, through my tears, that I didn’t come looking for something specific but anything that would relieve the pain I was in constantly. I left with nothing but a co-pay.

There was nothing I could do after that. The pain did begin to subside at some point and I took the Tramadol less frequently. Then, in the spring of 2013 I began to have more pain. I started working for the government and my insurance kicked in on March 1^st. I immediately went to see my old doctor at Kaiser (which I hadn’t seen in about 2 years) and explained the situation to her. She also agreed that it was probably inflammation and that x-rays wouldn’t do anything. However she did tell me that if it got worse or changed to give her a call and she would order x-rays. I left pretty satisfied because the pain, while different, wasn’t affecting me AS much as it had been the previous year.

Then in May I began to get sharp pains right under my right breast. It felt as though I was being stabbed there. They were strong enough that my knees buckled – during work. My co-workers looked at me worried and it took me a minute to catch my breath to be able to explain what happened. I immediately e-mailed my doctor and explained what happened. The next day I got a call in the morning from the nurse telling me to come in for a same-day appointment. My doctor wasn’t available but I saw a back-up. Although she wasn’t sure what was wrong, she ordered the x-rays. After taking the x-rays that afternoon the technician told me it would probably not be until the following Tuesday (it was Thursday) because of Memorial Day. I was surprise to get a call the very next morning from the same nurse inquiring if I had had trauma to my right ribs – had I been in a car accident or a motorcycle accident – anything? I told her that I hadn’t. Nothing. No falling, accidents, and definitely no punching. She could not understand it…

I had THREE broken/cracked ribs! I began to cry when she told me this. I couldn’t keep the tears in. I had a diagnosis! There was a real REASON that I was in pain and I wasn’t making it up, which is something that I had begun to believe. I scared my co-workers who rushed to my cubicle to see what was going on.

The following few weeks consisted in repeated visits to different doctors. My doctor left Kaiser and I was left seeing duty doctors for the moment. I was given Norco for the pain and told to take it every 4 hours and in between to continue taking Motrin. I did this but the pain still wasn’t going away. The doctor’s couldn’t understand it and so they ordered a CT scan. The scan showed TWO additional cracked ribs. Now, I’m not great at math but that was WAY too many ribs to be cracked from no trauma. No one bought into the idea that it happened by zipping up a dress, but there was (is) no other explanation! I was finally referred to a pain management doctor when the internal medicine ones were unable to help me.

I went and saw a pain doctor that I had seen years before for my upper back pain. Dr. Miles is a very nice person. While I wouldn’t describe her as warm, she is very caring and interested in finding a diagnosis and solving it – not just giving me medication. Immediately she told me that the pain was not from the broken ribs, which by this point had begun to heal, but instead from the nerves that run from the spinal cord between the ribs. She explained to me that nerves don’t like to be touched and so when the ribs broke they didn’t like it and reacted. She likened it to when you hit your “funny bone”. The bone, of course, is not funny – instead what happens is that you hit the nerve that runs along your elbow and it causes a shock which induces the pain. There is nothing that can be done about this – no surgery or exercise. Only medicine. She told me that there were two medications that could help me, one stronger than the other. The stronger one – Lyrica – is not covered by insurance and could be costly. We went ahead and went with Gabapentin, the less strong, generic version. She placed me on a low-dose of it and said we would stagger it up as needed through the next few months.

To cut this very long story a bit shorter, I ended up on the highest dosage – 800mg three times a day. It was still not giving me enough relief so at my last appointment she told me to add the Tramadol at least twice a day and at bedtime as needed. The tramadol no longer makes me sleepy during the day, but it does continue to make me wake up at night.

I am still in pain as the medicine wears off and it’s almost time to take it again. I’m typically uncomfortable and fidgety. The worst part of it is that Dr. Miles thinks that this is permanent. You never know what will happen, but after the amount of time that has passed since the initial “injury” in July 2012 the fact that I’m still in so much pain indicates that the nerves will probably not heal anymore.

If you’ve read all of this – thank  you!