That night.

Unfortunately, that is not how this story goes. I tried lying down and felt in my shoulder discomfort I had never felt before. I sat up and the pain immediately went away. Uncertain, I propped myself up on some pillows and tried to fall asleep. I was OK for about thirty minutes until the pain came back again with a vengeance. I got up to sit in our recliner and again, felt a bit better. I tried drifting off to sleep and got maybe another thirty minutes of rest before the excruciating pain was back.

I decided to get in the bathtub but the fluctuating pain carried on all night. I think I drifted off in the tub a few times, but mostly I stayed awake, talking to this new life inside me and encouraging the tiny force to be reckoned with. At 8am, I called my midwife’s office. I told them what was going on and they told me to come in right away. My husband’s job wouldn’t allow him to take off work on such short notice, so we called my mom and his sister and they came to be with me. My mom came and loaded me into her car; by the time we left I was very, very ill. The shoulder pain had increased exponentially and everything hurt.

When we arrived at the building I waddled in, the pain immense, and slowly made my way up to the third floor in the elevator. As I started to get out of the elevator, I knew I wasn’t going to make it. I collapsed right there in the hallway. My mom ran into the midwife’s office and the office staff came out immediately to help.

Moments later, one of my midwives came to check on me. I was sitting up on the table answering her questions as best I could. She asked me to lie down so she could check my IUD strings and I started crying as the pain was unbearable. She said she understood and she would be quick, but it needed to be done. So I laid back, pain washed over me, and I passed out. I came to about 30 seconds later and the room was in a panic. The midwife told me she thought the IUD perforated my uterus and I was bleeding internally.

My midwife called my OB, I was checked into the ER, and the doctors immediately administered an ultrasound. My OB told me that there was so much fluid in my abdomen that he couldn’t actually see where my IUD was or what the cause of the bleeding was, so he was going to have to go in blind and I would have to trust him. Thankfully, this man had already been an amazing doctor with one of my pregnancies and he had all of my trust.