The week after the walk I started bleeding heavily. I called my doctor and she told me it was probably just my first period after the pregnancy. She said it was nothing to worry about as long as the bleeding didn't get worse. But then it did...
The next morning I called my doctor's office at 8. They didn't open until 8:30 that day, so I called the on call number. Before I even explained my problem, the woman who answered the phone asked if it was an emergency. I tried to explain that it wasn't life threatening, but I did need to talk to someone. She said if it was not an emergency I needed to wait until the doctor's office opened a half hour later and call them. I reluctantly agreed and waited a half hour.
I called the doctor's office exactly at 8:30 and left a message for the doctor to call back. At noon, I still hadn't heard anything, so I called back. They told me that the message was on the top of the stack on her desk and she would call me back as soon as she could. Finally at 3:30, I got a call back. The doctor suggested that I make an appointment for the next day. The only doctor available at the time was one I had never seen before.
The next day, the doctor was not able to determine anything at the appointment, so she asked if I would wait around for the ultrasound machine to become available so that they could see what was going on. I waiting in the waiting room and watched a couple of happy couples go in for ultrasounds to see their babies. Then finally they were ready for me. One of the worst parts of the whole experience was laying there looking at a baby-less uterus. They did however discover leftover tissue and suggested that I have a D&C the same day. The doctor on call at the hospital happened to be the same doctor who had delivered Caiden and Kaylie a month earlier.
When I talked to the doctor before the surgery, I told him that I was supposed to leave for New York City the next morning. The day before Caiden and Kaylie were born, we were supposed to be at a baseball game. Since I was lying in the hospital, we were unable to go. The team had generously offered us four free tickets to any game in May to make up for the game we missed, but the upcoming weekend was the last opportunity for us to use the vouchers. The doctor said we would see how the surgery went, but if everything went okay, I could go on the trip as long as I promised to carry my cell phone with me at all times and know how to contact the nearest hospital.
When preparing for the surgery, the nurse asked for my weight to determine the amount of anesthesia needed. The last time I had been weighed was at my 20 week appointment, so I had no idea what to tell her. I made a guess and she asked how sure I was. I said "not very". (It turns out I was very generous with the amount of weight I thought I had lost, though I didn't find that out until a month and a half later when my doctor's office weighed me again.) The anesthesiologist came over and the nurse asked if he wanted to run any blood tests. He said "no, she looks nice and pink to me". I'm sure that he was very good at his job, but it was frightening how flippant he was being.
When the OR was ready for me, they tried to reach my doctor. He had told them he was going into a meeting and they should call him on his cell phone when the OR was ready, but then he turned off his cell phone. They ended up paging him over the hospital intercom. Meanwhile, I was trying to reach my husband who was still at work because I wasn't supposed to go in for surgery for another couple hours (another reason the anesthesiologist's flippant attitude terrified me, since they told me I couldn't go in for surgery until after 5 because I had eaten breakfast, and now they were ready to take me in at 3). I started crying and told them I couldn't go anywhere until my husband arrived. Luckily he only works just down the road from the hospital, and he arrived before they found the doctor.
In the end, they removed the "residual products of conception" and I came out of the surgery just fine. We left for New York City the next morning and had a very nice and totally uncomplicated trip. I carried my cell phone and the phone number of the nearest hospital with me, but never needed to use either.
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