How I Spent My Thanksgiving Holiday

....recovering from emergency surgery.

Really?!

Fuck.

We were out of town, staying at Mister's parents' house. They were traveling, so we were there alone. The plan was to spend the week there relaxing, and to also host the Thanksgiving feast for my family and some friends. I was excitedly preparing to co-cook a meal for about 12 people.

Then, in the wee hours of Wednesday morning (the day before Thanksgiving) I woke up to go to the bathroom.

....the rest of this gets sort of icky, so if you don't want to hear about it, leave now....

I was having some cramping....and I thought, 'finally, my period.' I had been expecting it for a week or so. But, no, no period. But pain. Lots and lots of pain. Like some one was stabbing me in the stomach and the groin, and twisting the knife around. I started seeing stars. I almost fell off the toilet. I made it back to the bed and told Mister, 'something is wrong.'

I had been having a sort of nagging pain on my right side for some time. I thought maybe it was a cyst...I figured I'd go have it checked after the holiday. Now, with this extreme pain, I figured I must be having an appendicitis.

When I got to the ER they had me pee in a cup.

Then the doctor told me, I was pregnant.

How?!?!? I had had sex exactly one time in the past two months, and had gotten my period that month. Since my period I NOT had any, ANY activity. So I knew two things: I must be pretty far along, and, something was wrong.

Still, while I waited for the ultrasound tech to come get me, my mind went wild: where will we put the second crib? We'll have to rearrange our storage so we can remove the second set of closets in Grace's room and make some room there. Oh my God, they are going to be so close in age! Will it be a boy or a girl? How will Handsome Man handle it....and so on.

I marveled at how it could be possible that I, a card-carrying Infertile, could now say, "Wow, he just looks and me and I get pregnant!" A saying that I had heard from women so many times over the years, and had made me want to vomit every time. Now here I was, the world's most fertile Infertile. Things like that just don't happen to a girl like me....

And then, the ultrasound. A pregnancy measuring 8 weeks. Alive. Not in my uterus.

Within an hour the OB doctor on call arrived and I was taken into surgery.

When I awoke I was shivering and shaking and all alone. Mister had taken the kids back to the house (at my urging) to get some sleep. When he came to pick me up he told me the doctor had called him after the surgery to let him know how it went. He tried to save the fallopian tube, he said, but it was too destroyed. And there was a lot of internal bleeding.

Physically, I am healing. It was not a delicate procedure like my other laparoscopy (which was performed by doctor Wunnerful). I look like I have been in a knife fight. Let's just say bikinis are no longer part of my future.

Emotionally, I have run the gamut of emotions. I know there was no possible way to save an ectopic pregnancy. But the word 'alive' keeps ringing in my ears. There was a baby there. And now there is not.

And I am short a tube.

I am mad at myself for not going to the doctor sooner for the pain. Seriously, had I had any reason to actually think I *might* be pregnant, I would have taken a HPT. I would have gone in right away. Maybe my tube could have been saved. I won't ever know, and I guess it doesn't matter now.

Needless to say, I didn't host Thanksgiving.