1986 – my first near-miss
“Yes, we have a 24-year-old white female,” I heard the other EMT interrupting me as he called it in. “Approximately 127 pounds, probable ruptured ectopic.”
I remember being amazed that he guessed my weight so accurately. And I remember being in the back of the ambulance driving west down Tudor Road zooming towards Providence Hospital. I had IVs in both arms and was thoroughly impressed. I heard the sirens, and someone say, “Code Blue,” and it felt like I was one of them, watching the patient.
“Wow,” I said out loud, “Code Blue, that’s bad, right?!” How cool, I thought. I was almost giddy. I did not get that they were talking about me; that I was dying.
My next memory was being in the hospital with a new doctor, one I did not know, telling us (how did my dad get there?) that I was pregnant but that the pregnancy was in my fallopian tube and had ruptured causing the bleeding.
“I can’t be pregnant,” I insisted. “I have an IUD.”
“She can’t be pregnant,” my father said. “She can’t be pregnant,” he repeated.
“Nevertheless, we need your consent to take you into surgery and you need to understand we may have to cut the tube. It may compromise your ability to have other children, though many women with one tube do fine and have no problem getting pregnant.”
I nod and sign the paperwork, then tell my dad to let mom know. He says okay. He looks lost. I am rushed off to surgery.
I had never heard of an ectopic pregnancy, a pregnancy that occurs outside of the uterus, most often in the fallopian tubes. Later we learned the Copper 7 IUD model that I had was great for neatly preventing pregnancy in the uterus, but not so reliable for preventing pregnancy in the fallopian tubes. It has since been recalled from the market. According to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, an ectopic pregnancy “occurs when a fertilized egg grows outside of the uterus. Almost all ectopic pregnancies—more than 90%—occur in a fallopian tube. As the pregnancy grows, it can cause the tube to burst (rupture). A rupture can cause major internal bleeding. This can be a life-threatening emergency that needs immediate surgery.” It is extremely rare for the fetus to survive an ectopic, particularly in my case where it had ruptured. A ruptured ectopic is the leading cause of women dying during the first trimester, accounting for 10% of those deaths. They are very rare. The risk of having an ectopic is about 1%, though in women using an IUD that number can increase to 4%.