Have a monkey, I've got a whole barrel

This post is graphic. You've been warned.

This morning, I got out of the shower, brushed my teeth, and gushed bright red blood all over the bathroom floor.

Had I been thinking about it, I would have bled on the shower floor rather than on the pretty green and white bathmats I'm rather fond of. Then again, had I been thinking about it, I also would have grabbed granola bars or something to eat in the waiting room at the ER, told the Husband to bring his blackberry so that he wouldn't be twiddling his thumbs aimlessly at the hospital, taken the car that had more than 0.64 litres of gas in it, and worn clothes that actually fit instead of the closest clothing I could grab.

However, it's not like one gets the opportunity to project plan these things.

The blood hit the floor and, well.. unless you've been a pregnant woman, it's nearly impossible to describe the feeling of fear and horror that sight causes. Pregnancies range from pretty easy to a real world version of hell, but mine so far has been pretty good all told, and I was optimistic that that would continue. But to see bright red blood produced at 15 weeks 5 days, well, there's no world in which that's nothing to worry about. I freaked out. I ran and got my husband, who also freaked out. We got in the car and drove like maniacs to the hospital, him driving the way I would usually yell at him for driving but now, I was silently cursing every other driver on the road and willing them to get out of our way, didn't these road hogging assholes know I was bleeding?

We screeched to a halt at the (mercifully empty) ER doors in record time and dashed inside, where I tried to say "I'm fifteen weeks pregnant and I'm bleeding" twice before I actually got the words out. Not exactly cool under pressure, me.

The nurses at the desk were angels from heaven, assessing me immediately, reassuring me that they would take care of me, getting me in to urgent care within minutes. Then in walked a fellow with a reassuring smile on his face to take my medical history, who was (1) cute, (2) about 15, and (3) making me feel really fucking old. Seriously, I know it's been a few years since I used to hang out at the Med school at Dal, but this guy didn't look much older than my niece, and while I love her a great deal, I'm not about to let her give me an internal exam. Mercifully, he admitted to being a 3rd year med student right away, which granted me at least a puff of relief. Except when I realized I was kind of a cougar.

At the emerg (or at any doctor), they have a process. Medical history, blood pressure, vitals, all the basics have to be covered before they proceed to tests or treatment. But I had a need, a major need to find out if my baby was still alive or not, and my needs clashed with theirs. I responded to every query with a variant of "yes, I'm 38, could you maybe go get a doppler?" or "uhhuh, first pregnancy, is there an ultrasound machine I could perhaps borrow for a minute?" I needed to know, needed ti find the heartbeat, needed to see if I was in fact mid-miscarriage as we speak or if by some miracle the blood was coming out for some other fully explainable and non-malicious reason. All else could wait. I wanted an answer now.

Mercifully, they wheeled the portable ultrasound in minutes later. And while the ER doc is not an ultrasound tech and kind of barely knew how to turn the thing on, moments later I was staring at a heartbeat and little waving arms. My baby's OK. Flipping around, waving as if to say "I'm all good in here, Mom!" My stress level went from 300% to barely 100% almost immediately.

A horribly uncomfortable internal followed (I let Doogie Howser perform it for the sake of his learning curve, and while the discomfort was more due to the fact that my cervix is completely in the wrong place than any med-student-inexperience on his part, it still hurt like a sonofabitch) as well as a manual probe by the ER doc to confirm my cervix is closed (and at this point, after the hideously uncomfortable internal and at the prospect of having that poor man shove his fingers up my bloody malformed vagina, I blurted out "Wow, this must be your favourite part of the day!" which he totally took the wrong way, heh). An hour later, I went upstairs to the OB floor and got a full ultrasound, where we saw Baby still alive, still blissfully floating, his/her delicate yet fully formed ribcage and spine glowing eerily on the screen, the lobes of the little brain, the limbs, the feet all present and accounted for... and being kept company in the womb by a 6 cm blood clot, the culprit of the bleeding.

No idea where it came from. No idea why. So there it is. Now I wait. I sit and I rest and I hope that it will just take the hint and go away on its own, absorbed back in to the uterus and forgotten like a bad dream.

But now I'm nervous. Now I'm twitchy. I had planned to live normally for the next six months. Can I do that? Can I get on the planes we had been planning on getting on in the next few months? Can I even go to work? That's the problem with this.. there's nothing I or any doctor can do. It's completely out of my control, and so I now feel the need to control or manage everything else around me in order to mitigate any risk. Except I have no idea what the risk IS.

I guess this is motherhood. It's all a barrel of monkeys.