It's just a bit of blood, right?

Don't Panic!

There are two words that no pregnant bloke ever wants to hear from his partner: I'm bleeding.

Just to mess with your head, there's bad bleeding and not so bad bleeding. Unfortunately they don't come with signs to say what they are - you have to guess, have faith, panic, go seek help or do some combination of all the above.

Not long after she started using the Crinone pessaries, SWMBO started bleeding slightly. We left it for a couple of days, but it carried on. Then one day while she was at work, the bleeding got worse and we decided that it would be best to go to the local Women's Emergency Department. Fortunately for SWMBO she works quite close. Unfortunately for me I don't, and couldn't find a taxi so I drove, maybe just a little bit quicker than I should have.


After running from the car park into the ED, the only thing I can remember is seeing SWMBO sitting in the waiting room with her eyes puffy and red. The bottom just about fell out of my world seeing her like that, especially knowing that I was useless to do anything about it. We were eventually seen by a lovely midwife (let's call her 'L' - she'll come back in a later episode) who took some blood for a pregnancy test (HCG) and to check SWMBO's blood type.

We sat around for a couple of hours until we were seen by an obstetrician who had managed to get SWMBO's other HCG test results from the fertility clinic. In case you don't know, the HCG 'number' is supposed to double every couple of days. SWMBO's number had halved. The doctor left us alone, we both cried.

The doctor came running back into the room soon afterwards to tell us that she'd read the wrong result and the HCG test had in fact doubled. She'd given us the wrong bloody test results. I know that mistakes happen, but I was getting close to breaking point. Don't ask me why, at this point in time all we had were a bunch of lines on sticks and some doubling HCG numbers, but they were our sticks and numbers damnit and we were getting bloody attached to them!

The obstetrician gave SWMBO an ultrasound and showed us the 'sac' where cells should've been dividing and doing their thing, but told as that he only way we'd know what was happening and know whether or not we had a bun in the oven was for SWMBO to have an internal ultrasound. Unfortunately, she wasn't "skilled" in using dildocam. We'd have to wait for that until the next afternoon for an appointment.

After a visual examination, the doctor said that she could see "membranous material" at the cervix but couldn't tell where the bleeding was coming from so we'd definitely have to wait until the next. By this time we'd calmed down a bit and were starting to resign ourselves to the fact that SWMBO wasn't going to be pregnant for much longer and got ourselves ready to go home.

We had to stop by the nurses station on the way out. SWMBO was advised to take the next day off work as she was having a "threatened miscarriage". I'm sure my heart skipped several beats at this point. It would've been helpful if the bloody midwife had said that ANY vaginal bleeding at less than 24 weeks is called a threatened miscarriage. Either that or they could come up with a term that doesn't include the 'M' word.

We went home and didn't sleep too much that night. There wasn't a fat lot we could do the next day other than go to work in the morning (not our most productive day ever) and wait for the full ultrasound that afternoon.