annanotbob2's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Ectopic The lead story on The Guardian earlier was about ectopic pregnancies, how they're still misdiagnosed, missed altogether, leading too often to serious health problems and still to maternal deaths. Which has made me think of the ectopic pregnancy I had in about 1975. [April 4th, 1976, I just looked it up] I'd been in Spain, in Madrid, hiding out in my boyfriend Jose's parents' flat. I was still officially married to my first husband (I may not have mentioned him), though I'd left him years before and Jose and I couldn't find anywhere to live as we had to show our papers and mine said I was married to someone else. So I did a lot of sneaking in and out, sharing a bedroom with his sister, spending my days with him in his attic jewelry workshop, high above central Madrid, having the best sex ever lying on my Oxfam real fur coat on the dusty floor. Jewelers don't sweep up, they have an industrial cleaner every now and then who takes it away and separates out all the fragments of gold, silver, platinum. I read loads of books, watched him make beautiful rings, bracelets, got treated like a rich bitch because of my fur coat, ate my first McDonalds - they were excited to show me, Jose and Chuz, his sister, but I'd never heard of them and thought they were shite - not even a plate, ffs. We ran into a cinema one day to escape a sudden downpour of icy rain and saw Harold and Maud, with a soundtrack of music by Cat Stevens. Anyway, I started getting terrible pains in my stomach. Probably not my stomach, as it turns out, but in the front part of me. Really disabling. No chance of seeing a doctor but a pharmacist gave me suppositories - they do like a suppository in Spain, but nothing changed so in the end I had to come home. On what was to be my last day his parents told Jose that they knew all about me and I was to have a meal with them on my last night. His fierce dad kept passing me his flask - I guess that's what it was called, animal skin, something really strong - you had to hold it up away from your mouth and tip it straight in from a height. He was lovely, Jose. I look him up online every now and then but haven't found him yet. I can't remember how it unfolded when I got home - I must have seen a doctor, but I soon found myself in London watching J J Cale at the Hammersmith Odeon, with a right bunch of reprobates, my old pals. On the way back down to Brighton the pain started up again, really bad, excruciating. I stopped off with T who lived half way to Brighton and he called a doctor who examined me briefly and called an ambulance. The next thing I know I'm in Redhill Hospital being told I'd had appendicitis so my appendix had been removed and all would be well. But it wasn't. I was still in pain, more so than before. The nurses were scornful - they'd seen children making less fuss after an appendectomy than me and I needed to shape up. I was discharged still in crippling pain with a bottle of heavy duty painkillers (which were banned a few years later), feeling full of shame at how feeble I was. I did my best to pull myself together and went out clubbing in Brighton with T. We were off our faces, drinking and dancing and having a good time until suddenly another great surge of pain left me reeling. I rushed downstairs to the grotty little toilet cubicle, very Trainspotting, where I suddenly started passing big clots of blood. T went and fetched his car and drove me, very slowly, stopping and starting because of the pain, to my parents in what was now the middle of the night, unable to make a decision about what was best, due to being totally spaced out. The parents called 999 and an ambulance arrived, the paramedics gave me a big shot of morphine and off I went to another hospital. In A&E I was asked what the fresh scar was on my belly. Appendectomy. Why is it a vertical scar instead of the usual keyhole? I don't know, do I? Hmm, said the big clever doctor. I bet there wasn't anything wrong with your appendix but they took it out anyway, sewed you up and chucked you out. He went off to phone Redhill and came back to tell me he'd been right, my appendix had been fine. So I was carted off to the operating theatre, emerging to be told that it had been an ectopic pregnancy, I'd lost one of my Fallopian tubes, but they'd cleared it all out and I'd be fine now. The big mouth doctor came to look at me on the ward and I asked him if I'd be able to use a contraceptive coil again, my preferred method back then. Oh you won't need that, he said, breezily. You'll be sterile now. And off he strolled to piss on someone else's dreams, no doubt. And he was wrong, the fucker. I was pregnant four more times - three children and one termination - and I've been scared of misdiagnosis ever since. But I had a very near miss according to today's article in The Guardian. 11:07 p.m. - 01.05.23 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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