The Pregnancy Diaries #6 – Sickness, Dehydration & Hospital

On Monday 21st November 2016, I was taken into hospital.

It’s simple really… I needed help! I was in so much pain and hadn’t kept down food or even a sip of water in a long time. My eyes were grey. My lips were cracked. I kept crying. I couldn’t sleep. I was too hungry, starving really. My eyes wouldn’t focus. I couldn’t walk without help. I felt dizzy if I moved my head in the slightest. I was so thirsty. So much so, that when I cried I tried to keep the tears back in fear of wasting moisture. My skin was blotchy and sore from the tears. I didn’t feel human anymore.

I didn’t understand how I was still breathing and I was being a terrible mama. Numb and empty laying in bed, afraid to move as Matt made sure that Noah and Ellenah were okay. My heart was breaking apart, bit by bit. I missed them so much. I missed the way we do things. I missed the motherhood that I had loved for the past seven and a half years.

I was in trouble. I was broken. I couldn’t remember when I smiled last, from a happy heart.

All I could focus on was someone helping me to get through this. Someone helping me get back to health. Someone giving me back to my children. We needed each other. There had to be someone who could help me.

It wasn’t just the sickness. I was in such traumatic pain. I thought I was losing the little person in my body. The tiny little person who I wanted to give life. The person who I thought my body was killing, rejecting. I thought something was seriously wrong. It hurt so much. I felt like i was being butchered from the inside.

So from a couple of phone calls, a trip to the doctor, a trip to A&E, a trip to the early pregnancy unit and an internal scan later… I was sent to my cubicle on the labour ward where after days of no food or drink, I collapsed on the bed. Unaware of the midwife attaching me to an IV and unsure what was happening.

I missed the first time that we got to see our baby. I was ridiculously weak and as much as my eyes were open, I couldn’t see as far as the screen and there wasn’t much behind my eyes even if I could have. As I said, it was an internal scan. I was being checked over for an ectopic pregnancy. If i’m honest, from the moment I was advised that this was the suspected problem, I had started to say goodbye to my baby. I don’t think it showed on the outside how much I was hurting, how much I was breaking. I could no longer imagine his or her face or the life that we were going to have, all together. Every happy thought that I had allowed myself about the pregnancy up to this point had started to fade. I didn’t think that I could be any more broken than I was… but, I surprised myself I guess. An ectopic pregnancy made sense to me I suppose. I had suffered terrible pregnancy sickness with my son Noah, for my whole pregnancy…but nothing this relentless. I think I thought deep down, ‘How could a baby ever survive this?’

But… My baby was as tough as old boots it seemed. Much tougher than me. Baby had a beautiful, strong heartbeat… And was growing in exactly the right place. And in seconds, I was a little less broken. A little more ready to start fighting again. For my baby. To get back home to my perfect, little family… Where this mama belonged.

And so I did my time ‘inside’. It was bad. My hydration levels were shot. I was on the IV permanently, for three days. When I needed to pee… I had to take the fluids with me. I couldn’t shower. And, after being starved further by the midwives due to anti-sickness injections for the first twelve hours, I had to be reintroduced to food. Very dry foods. Ever had to eat dry bran flakes after not eating or drinking for days? It’s a shit show, let me tell you! It was a hard slog and it took me all of the first day to eat them.

Going home was completely out of the question.

I had to jump through the hoops, keep the food down, not heave and I lost all of my dignity in the process, by handing over every single wee that I did. Let me tell you, walking down the hallway, past the rooms with the mama’s holding their newborns, while holding onto my IV and my bed pan wasn’t nice in any way. It was always so cold and people stared at me. I just wanted to go home.

Matt and my children visited me on the second night but it was horrible. I didn’t like seeing them sat at the bottom of my bed. I didn’t want them to see me hooked up to wires with blood still dripping from my arm. I didn’t want them to remember this. I sent them away early and I cried like a baby. I cried myself to sleep that night. I cried a lot until I could go home if i’m being honest. It’s embarrassing. I wish I was more brave about it but I was so homesick… And the worst patient in the world.

Once I had started to feel better, was off of the drip and I had a bit of life about me… I begged anyone who would listen, to let me go home. At one point I got so desperate, I asked the lady who brought around supper and bless her, she was a petite filipino lady who couldn’t understand much english. She asked me if I wanted juice, tea or coffee. I politely declined and accepted more water with my head hanging low.

I discharged myself eventually. I couldn’t stay anymore. The doctor got held up and I knew I would be better off at home. So I left with a prescription of Cyclizine and returned home for some rest in my own bed, surrounded by my people, my backbone and the reason that I had to stop crying.

The Cylizine worked for a few days…

Love Ria x