October 15, 2005-Saturday

Today was a very scary day. There was blood in my urine for the first time and I was really scared about what the meant. I had been doing well all day, a friend came by to visit in the morning and kept me company for a couple of hours. In the afternoon, Rachel, a close friend of mine, came by to keep me company, and we watched a movie. Sometime during the middle of the movie, I got up to go empty my bladder. I noticed that there was a slight pinkish color on the toilet paper after I wiped, and I looked down at the urine. It had specks of blood in it! At the moment when I walked out of the bathroom, my husband and my dad had just walked into the room. I looked straight at hubby and said, “I’m bleeding…” I must have been white as a ghost and looked really scared, I only noticed that his facial expression became very serious and all I could see was concern. My dad walked out of the room immediately as the nurse came in. I told her that there was blood in my urine, and I felt my heart racing like never before. She was very calm, and asked if I wanted to be put on the monitor to listen to the baby and make sure everything was okay. Once she hooked me up to the monitor, she went and took a look at the “potty hat” (I had not discarded the urine yet). She then approached hubby and I, asked me to calm down, and explained that everything was okay. She said that the amount of blood was very minimal and not alarming, that it could have been that the baby had disturbed the placenta and that is why I had bled. She also mentioned that with a previa it is common to see some bleeding once in a while, and it was okay as long as it was minimal. She said that I needed to calm down; my heart rate was so strong that the monitor was not being able to detect baby’s heartbeat. It took me about 20mins to finally get my body out of that fear state, and felt relieved that it was not an “emergency” situation. My husband and I were so grateful to have had such a calm nurse that day that could explain to us what was going on, and why it was no reason to become alarmed. The doctors had failed to mention to us that minimal bleeding was not a reason to be alarmed! The only thing I knew, from what the doctor’s had said, was that if I started to bleed it could be very risky to the baby. I had a second episode of blood in my urine that same afternoon, but then it stopped as the nurse predicted. It was very scary, the only thing that was going through my mind, when I walked out of the bathroom was, “I’m bleeding….this is bad, please God, let the baby be okay!” It is an awful fear to have, the thought of losing our baby is devastating.