Below is my recent hospital admission with kidney stones (apparently this kind of pain is worse than labour). It’s written very fast because I’m somewhat traumatized from the experience and don’t want to spend too much time perfecting the writing. I’m just going to spew out whatever in one go.
December 16, 2023
I woke up around 2:30am, then managed to fall asleep again at 5am. I woke up an hour later and something didn’t feel right. I was having mild cramping in my lower back and things just felt off. The cramping reminded me of my miscarriage so I got a bit worried that maybe I was going into early labour or that something was wrong with the placenta and found Tristan in the other room. I couldn’t really explain the feeling to him, I kept repeating that things didn’t feel quite right, and that maybe it’d be good to go to the hospital. We took an Uber to St. Paul’s (our car battery had died sigh) and headed to emergency who then sent us upstairs to the maternity ward since I was past 20 weeks pregnant. I wasn’t feeling too bad at this point, just felt a bit ill and still had the mild back cramps. A maternity nurse checked me in and put me in a bed so they could do a trace of the baby’s heart and also monitor if I was having contractions. I’ll just include a generic image below of what these fetal monitors look like, but they’re basically hard round discs tightly strapped across your belly.
The nurse said they needed to do the trace for at least 20 minutes to get a good reading of the baby. Then, I took a turn really fast. Less than 20 minutes later, I started screaming, sweating profusely, and vomiting. The pain in my lower back grew and I started feeling an immense pressure in my lower left abdomen. The fetal monitors increased my pain and I started begging for them to remove them, swatting away the nurse’s hands whenever they’d try to reposition me or the monitor, but the nurses said I had to endure it for a bit longer to figure out what was going on and if the baby was in distress. I kind of went totally incoherent at this point, screaming, moaning, begging for someone to help me etc since the pain was so extreme. A nurse got an IV line into me somehow and also took off some of my layers to cool me down. In my pain delirium, I told them to just cut my clothes off because them touching me was unbearable. They didn’t do this, of course, but that’s how useless the pain rendered me. I also needed to pee really badly and begged if I could have a bedpan or to just wet the bed because I couldn’t make it to the bathroom. Basically, I screamed and puked for about three hours while they ran tests and Tristan was understandably very freaked out that me and the baby were in danger. Then, thank goodness, they came back saying I wasn’t in labour and the baby was fine and gave me my first shot of pain relief (fentanyl). That provided about 10 minutes of pain relief before I started screaming and puking again. I got a few more shots of fentanyl, then they switched me over to morphine + gravol delivered intramuscularly which had a longer pain relief window (about 4 hours). The doctor suspected kidney stones and I was ordered an ultrasound. Long story short, they moved me into a private room (so nice!) so me and Tristan could rest while they monitored my pain. After the ultrasound, I had one more shot of morphine and waited for the doctor who came back saying they couldn’t find any evidence of kidney stones and was therefore stumped. They wanted to hold me overnight and have a general surgery consult if my pain came surging back. The pain did not come back, we slept, and in the morning the doctor returned to his original theory of kidney stones and that I had potentially passed them before I went in for my ultrasound. This seems most likely to me due to my severe morning sickness and being chronically dehydrated throughout pregnancy. Anyway, it was a scary experience, but the maternity nursing staff and doctor were so unbelievably kind to us and took amazing care of me. I’m very thankful I trusted that something wasn’t right and headed to the hospital when I did, otherwise Tristan probably would’ve had to call an ambulance. I’m thankful the baby is fine and now I’m trying to drink water more seriously (over 2 L a day for pregnancy).
Other not as exciting updates (more of these please for the last few months of pregnancy). I’m going to just make bullet points here because I’m still drained from the kidney stone experience and feeling a bit overwhelmed.
I’ve been experiencing waves of pregnancy insomnia. I will sleep for 4 hours, be awake for 4 hours, then fall asleep for a few more hours. I’m not sure if my body is torturing me with this in order to prepare for the newborn sleepless phase. I’m already someone prone to insomnia, so maybe I’m just more sensitive to the surge of pregnancy hormones. My hips also ache horrendously at night and I’m far enough along in my pregnancy that you’re no longer allowed to sleep on your back, so this has been bothersome.
The baby kicks a lot, which I love. The baby likes to hang out at the bottom of my uterus.
I haven’t been emotional at all during pregnancy (maybe confirms what everyone says about me, that I don’t have emotions). One less thing to worry about!
I find artificial sweeteners absolutely disgusting, along with other synthetic food additives. I was already pretty cautious of additives before, but now my body absolutely rejects them.
The mom economy is pretty amazing. We’ve managed to source 80% of our baby times from free parent groups. I’d recommend joining a facebook parent group if you’re thinking of having kids.
I did the glucose test to rule out gestational diabetes (passed, thankfully). You have to drink a 50g sugar liquid, wait an hour, then have your blood drawn. The drink is DISGUSTING. Tristan came with me and we sat and watched the different types of people coming in for blood work while I tried not to throw up (vomiting invalidates the test and I would have had to come back).
The day after being discharged for kidney stones I had to go back to the same hospital for a cardiac obstetrics appointment (unrelated to the kidney stones), but my heart is totally fine and handling the stress of pregnancy well.
Things I wish I knew before getting pregnant:
That I should be doing pelvic floor exercises and just generally trying to get my health better before pregnancy. Then again, I didn’t know I was going to wind up with severe morning sickness and be bedridden for months into the pregnancy. That really didn’t help me.
Things I worry about:
My chronic illness symptoms rushing back after birth.
Not being strong enough to labour through a natural delivery. I’ve been considering an elective c-section, but we will see how the next few months are for me and I’ll be seeing my midwife team again soon.
And I’ll end this post with some dark pregnancy humour that made me feel better and gave me a good laugh!