I’m just kind of numb. I haven’t had any big emotional response to this yet, but here’s what happened:
On Monday my wife was 12 weeks pregnant and started spotting, then started bleeding. She looked at her pregnancy books from when our daughter was born last year, and they said that this can be normal. A call to her mother, an RN, confirmed this.
Yesterday, the bleeding got heavier. She called her OB, who scheduled her for an ultrasound today at 3:15 p.m.
At around 2:00 this morning, she woke me up and told me she thought she was miscarrying. The blood was coming out like urine. We talked, and we stayed calm. She passed most of the tissue at around 3:00 or 3:30.
At 4:00 a.m., she went to the bathroom because she felt a gush of blood onto her pad. I told her I was going to try to catch a little sleep since I had to be up for work at 5:30.
At 4:07 I heard a thump and a crash. I called out to her; she did not respond. I jumped up and opened our bathroom door. She was slumped over on the toilet, as white as a ghost. She did not respond to me the first three times I said her name.
She responded the fourth, saying, “I think I need to go to the hospital.” I threw on jeans and a t-shirt and went to help her off the toilet.
She stood up, then lost all power and collapsed against me. This happened twice more. At 4:12 a.m. I reached into my pocket for my phone while trying to hold her up and called 911.
The paramedics came and walked her down the stairs; our staircase couldn’t accommodate the stretcher. They put her on the stretcher outside and loaded her into the ambulance. I got our 11-month-old daughter out of her crib, grabbed her jacket and diaper bag, loaded her into the car, and followed the ambulance to the hospital.
On the way there, I called our boss (principal; we teach at the same school) and left a voicemail that we wouldn’t be in and that we were going to the hospital.
I called my wife’s mom and let her know what was going on; she told me to keep her up to date. I called my mom, too. Everyone was then sufficiently worried.
At the hospital, I went back to the ER to see my wife. She was finally alert and responding to the doctor. They got her hooked up to an IV and all the other stuff and examined her. Luckily, almost everything was out of her; the doctor had to pull a little bit of a clot and some placenta out by hand, but there was no need for surgery.
Her hemoglobin count was down to 10. It was supposed to be between 12 and 14; she lost at least two pints of blood. At a count of 8, she would have needed a transfusion. She instead got a shot of pitocin to make her uterus contract, a rhogham shot because she has A- blood, and morphine for the pain of the cramps.
A co-worker came and got my daughter from me and took her to the daycare. She was one of my heroes of the day; we live 2100 miles from our families, and have no one else out here to help us out. She drove about 30 miles, round-trip, out of her way to help me out this morning.
My wife was stabilized and feeling better. Our boss called and told me that she’s only to come in on Friday if she feels like she has to. We have half-days every Friday, and he wants her to rest if she needs it. It’s a nice gesture, but we’re out of paid time off, so we’re not sure if she can miss that day and make it three unpaid days off in a row, and four within two weeks.
She got discharged around 8:15 a.m. We went to get breakfast, went home, and got some sleep. I’ve spent most of today on the phone and staying calm. I’m going in to work tomorrow, and I hope that I don’t unleash all of this emotion inappropriately at some point. I’ve never dealt with anything like this, and I just don’t know how I’m supposed to be acting right now. My wife and daughter are both asleep, MSU and Duke are playing on the TV in the background, and I’m sitting here typing. What am I supposed to be doing?
Sorry for the blogginess of this. I’d rather post this here than on my FB blog or anything; none of you know me in real life, and there’s something comforting about that right now.
