Ruptured: An Essay on my Ectopic Pregnancy & Loss

Published on The Rumpus. Here is an excerpt….

When I arrived in Lenox, Massachusetts to be the guest speaker at Canyon Ranch for the week, the pain was so bad that I reverted to Google despite knowing how very bad it is to Google anything medical. What is methotrexate supposed to feel like? How do you know if your fallopian tube is bursting? Does wine cancel the effects of the shot? Can you die from an ectopic pregnancy? How bad is the pain supposed to be?

I stayed up the entire night weeping with pain. I tried putting my legs up the wall. I cursed. I begged. I took my clothes off and then put them on again. I sweated. I shivered. I put pillows under my legs and then flipped my body so the lump of pillows was under my head. I sat up. I kept hearing the words back labor and was sure that was happening, even though I wasn’t in labor. Or was I? I tried to lie down.

The morning came, and I didn’t know how to tell if I was still alive except to start talking. “Hello, I’m here. Hello, I’m a person in the world.”

The next night I emailed my regular doctor rather than my ob-gyn, since I have a close relationship with him. He has been my doctor for over sixteem years. I emailed him at 4:27 a.m. EST to ask, “If I go to sleep, will I die?”

He wrote back (not surprisingly), even though it was also late in California. He is dedicated and hard-working. He told me I wouldn’t die, but he said that it was time I considered going to the hospital since the pain was so bad and he was concerned.

***

“You seem anxious. Are you always this anxious?” the ER nurse asked me when I started to cry after she couldn’t get a vein for my IV.

Only when I am in the ER in a place far away from home. Only when I think I am dying. Only when I have an ectopic pregnancy.