Not for the squeamish.
I woke up from a vivid dream at about 3:00 this morning and made one of my many overnight trips to the bathroom. When I sat down, I realized my underwear and shorts were soaked through with blood. Super scary. I wiped and saw more blood. Bright red, no clotting or tissue (which was a good sign, I thought). My immediate thought was that it was cervical and not an issue with the baby. I put on a pad and laid back down, since I was exhausted and thought I could get back to sleep.
Not so. I talked myself into being more concerned, so I kept getting up to check and see if I was still bleeding. I was, but still with no cramping or anything. Eventually, I calmed down enough to go back to sleep, convinced that it would be gone when I woke up.
I got up at 7:00 and unfortunately the pad was full, so I had bled more. I changed it, cleaned up, and called the midwives' office and left a message. I didn't call the on-call number because I knew that there's nothing to be done about bleeding-- it's bad or it's not, but all you can do is hope for the best and check on the baby. I emailed my boss to let her know I wouldn't be coming in. I drove the girls to camp.
Back at home, I called Monika on her cell phone as I was sitting in the car in the driveway. She was very empathetic, and it actually pushed me toward feeling upset for the first time (up to then, I'd say it was more detached concern-- I wasn't opening myself up to fully feeling the worry). We set up a 10:30 appointment to come in and check the baby. Then I hung up and cried for about 10 minutes. That helped. I shook myself off, ate some ice cream for breakfast, and then laid around until Rick got home (he was on shift last night).
When I went to the bathroom before the appointment, there was nothing on the pad. So though I'd bled quite a bit between 3 and 7, there was nothing between 7 and 10. That felt like a good sign.
Rick drove us to the appointment. As soon as I walked in, I told Monika, "I really think everything is ok. The bleeding stopped. I'm not cramping. We're going on the assumption that everything is ok." That was my attempt to shut down the empathy, which I knew would make me cry again. And it worked.
Mary came in, with her empathetic/worried face on, but I headed that off to. She said, "Ok, let's go ahead and check you out." She put the doppler on my belly and only had to search for about 10 seconds before we heard the heartbeat loud and strong. Baby was clearly doing just fine. I really thought he would be, but of course it was still a relief. My uterus felt fine, no pain. I had no fever (my temp was 98.6 exactly).
Next she did a pelvic exam and found a large polyp on my cervix. Cervical polyps are common for women with 2+ pregnancies, and actually, I had one last time too. They are benign and if they haven't just gone away on their own before delivery, they generally twist off then. They are not a threat to anything, but they could bleed. So that was one possible cause for the bleeding. And given the color (bright red) and consistency (thin), she thought it was a likely explanation.
The other possibility was a bleed from the placenta. Mary said that sometimes a small lip of the placenta will lift off of the uterine wall, causing a wound that can bleed. The lifted section can either (1) heal, (2) continue to ooze blood, but stay the same size, or (3) continue to detach, eventually jeopardizing the pregnancy. (3) is very rare. I asked her if this was the same as subchorionic hemorrhage, which I know is a common complication of IVF (I've seen many other surrogates have bleeding from SCH). She said it was.
So we had two possible explanations for the bleeding, neither of which was a major concern. But she said that for peace of mind, she could refer me to Dr. Berry for an ultrasound. I said I thought that would be good, so she called and set up the appointment for 3:30.
At Dr. Berry's office, we had the same super-fast/abrupt sonographer that we had two weeks ago for the first trimester screening. I had told Rick ahead of time to be ready to video, since I knew we wouldn't have much time to get situated! She said, "So, we're making sure this baby still has a heartbeat." And I said, "Actually, we're pretty confident it does. We wanted to see if we could figure out what was causing the bleeding-- maybe a subchorionic hemorrhage?" She said, "Well, most of the time, we can't tell what causes bleeding. Let's take a look."
The ultrasound was a little difficult to see-- weird angles or something. But she immediately pointed out the heartbeat, which had a rate of 169 bpm. Then she started looking around the placenta (which, incidentally, is along the back of my uterus). If you listen carefully to this video, you can hear her discovering what might be a teeny tiny SCH. She took measurements from a few angles, but it was very small and flat. She said if that's what it was, they would expect it to be resolved when we come back for our 19 week ultrasound.
And that was it. No pics, so all we have is Rick's bootlegged video.
The best view of the baby we had was when she says "There's your baby," but I'm not sure you can see it well here. I could see the whole spine-- pretty neat.
So that was my exciting day. Remember when I said boring was a GOOD thing during pregnancy? I'd like the boring back, please. Oh, on that note, it's worth mentioning that under either theory, I could have more bleeding. It shouldn't be as scary, since we know it's probably ok, but yuck. Nobody wants to see bleeding during pregnancy. So hopefully, last night was the end of it.
Very thankful that baby is doing well. And thanks M and N for being so calm and supportive today-- you deserve gold stars and cookies. Come to think of it, I'm going to go eat a cookie right now, in your honor.
