I'm A Medical Mystery

In my life, I've always been really healthy. Perfect vision, able bodied, nothing really has held me back from doing much. Every once and a while though, things happen and I have to go to the doctor. When I was around 20 years old, I had three separate occurrences of this excruciating pain in my belly that lasted for no longer than 30 minutes. When the pain was gone, I was able to continue as if it never happened. When you experience such a debilitating pain though, no matter how short lived, it's pretty concerning, so I went to the doctor expecting to be told what it was and how to make it never happen again. Well... That wasn't what happened. The doctor sent me to get an ultrasound and they never found a thing out of the ordinary. To this day, I still have no idea what it was. I'm just glad it doesn't happen anymore.

Fast forward a few years. I'm expecting my second child. I spent the whole first trimester in bed and completely useless because I was so incredibly sick. At least I knew why I was sick though. This second pregnancy seemed to be an improvement compared to my first go around though. I never really got a break from the nausea during my first pregnancy. With this second pregnancy, I started feeling better than I ever did the first time around at 16-17 weeks. It was a miracle! Prayers were being answered and my life had become a living testament to Divine Intervention.

Then last week on Tuesday, my body started doing things that it shouldn't do when pregnant. I waited it out until Wednesday morning to see if it would regulate, but it seemed to get worse, so I called the doctor and was told to go to the hospital. My husband and I spent all day Wednesday in a monitoring room. I was hooked up to all kinds of machines to watch the baby and me. The doctors thought that maybe my water had broken and was slowly leaking and if that was the case, I could have an infection. I was being told all sorts of scary things. If they confirmed my water broke, I was stuck in the hospital until I delivered. If they confirmed infection, I could be delivering the baby within the next couple days... at 24 weeks. Not ideal...

I was taken to get an ultrasound to check fluid levels and all the rest of the stuff they needed to know. Everything looked completely normal though, so here I was again, stumping the doctors. Something was obviously not right, but the doctors just couldn't pinpoint what it was. To their credit, they ran a whole bunch of tests to rule out all the scary stuff. Those tests just weren't all that pleasant. One of them involved sticking a needle in my belly and taking some amniotic fluid out and injecting a blue dye in. They wanted to run a culture on the fluid to rule out infection and they wanted to inject the dye to see if it was leaking at all. There was no leaking and the cultures would take a few days to process. They also tested my blood, which showed an elevated white blood cell count, which is an indicator of infection. Once they found that, they wasted no time hooking me up to an IV and admitting me into the hospital for the next two days at least. I was pumped full of some really nasty drugs for those two days. I was given antibiotics as a precaution in case there really was an infection and some other crazy concoction that was supposed to help speed up the baby's brain development in case delivery was unavoidable. I also got some steroid shots to boost the baby's lung development. All those drugs acted like a muscle relaxant so I literally could not get out of bed for those two days. The drugs were giving me awful hot flashes and my face felt like it was constantly on fire. I had to keep telling myself that all this was for the good of the baby. Preparing for the worst, and hoping for the best type of thing.

Finally I was able to be taken off the IV drugs that were making me feel so awful and I was transferred out of the Labor and Delivery Unit and into the Women's Pavilion for observation. The doctors told me that only one of the three cultures they're running was complete and it was totally negative, so that was a good sign. I just had to stay put in the hospital until the other two were done and if they were also negative, I would be free to go home.

Apparently that was all too good to be true though, because if it wasn't one thing, it was another. Totally out of the blue, I started bleeding a good amount on Saturday night and was given the news on Sunday that because of the bleeding, even though it mostly stopped by the morning, that I would have to stay in the hospital for another week. They need to keep me under close watch, so they monitor the baby twice a day and check for contractions to make sure I'm not going into pre-term labor. As long as the bleeding doesn't start up again, I should hopefully be able to go home in six days...

So I'm going to have been in the hospital for a minimum of a week and a half and I don't really have any concrete answers as to why. I'm still trying to decide if that's a good thing or not. I at least have the assurance of the nurses when they monitor the baby that he doesn't act like a sick baby. They all say how healthy he looks on the monitor, and if we were going strictly by that, it's pretty clear that everything is gonna be okay.

I've received several blessings since all this started, and they have all have left me with a really overwhelming feeling that all truly will be okay. I don't know why I have to experience all this stuff, but I know that Heavenly Father has it under control and I need to trust that feeling. My husband reminds me of that often. He's doing surprisingly well under the circumstances, and he credits his feelings of peace to what the Spirit is telling him. His confidence helps me be confident in a great outcome. I know that Heavenly Father has a plan for everything and we never experience things without a purpose. Heavenly Father obviously knows something that the doctors don't. It's been a theme of my life, and I think as long as I use this time to come closer to Him and not get upset or mad, that I'm doing my part to make sure Heavenly Father can ensure the best outcome.

What a life I lead... At least my family is being taken care of. Ray is doing his best playing the temporary single Dad role. I'm not a very public person when it comes to stuff like this. I don't like to announce that I'm sick or that I'm in the hospital, especially when I can't give answers as to why. When Ray went to Church yesterday, naturally people asked where I was, and by that point there's really no avoiding telling people. Apparently people get upset with me for keeping all this to myself for so long. I just don't like the attention it brings me, so I prefer to keep it more private. At this point though, there's no point being secretive about it. Enough people know, and enough people are asking why that my friends and family deserve an explanation. I appreciate prayers and good vibes sent my way. That's really all people can do for me, personally. I'm more concerned about my husband and son, so if you're in a position to help watch Warren, bring my family a meal, anything like that, it would mean the most to me. Knowing that they are okay is the greatest relief to me.

That's all the information I have. Here's hoping the next few months of my life are quiet and that my body decides to stop giving the doctors mysteries they can't solve. :)