This is a personal experience which I will split in more than one post. It still is very painful for me to write about it.
About a year ago I got married to a beautiful woman, she's a successful fashion designer that has founded her own firm and sells personalized clutch bags all over the world (see below).
We very much wanted to have children, so, some 6 months into our marriage (Feb 2016) we finally got a confirmed pregnancy. We went out to tell family and friends. Everyone was happy for us and we were glowing.
In the next routine check the doctors had trouble finding the gestational sac, my wife was starting to feel some pain and was showing initial signs of bleeding. The pregnancy was getting complicated. It was defined as an ectopic pregnancy, this is, a pregnancy in which the fetus develops outside the womb, typically in a fallopian tube. Some 1% of all pregnancies are ectopic.
An ectopic pregnancy can become complicated, where an internal rupture may develop into a hypovolemic shock and eventually have the mother bleed to death. Death from rupture is still the leading cause of death in the first trimester of the pregnancy.
Whilst the vast majority of ectopic pregnancies are "tubal", thus in the fallopian tube, in our case, and after additional testing, it was determined as a nontubal ectopic pregnancy, hence the gestational sac was located in the cervix (the neck of the uterus). Nontubal ectopic pregnancies account for 2% of ectopic pregnancies. Ectopic pregnancies are 1/100 as mentioned above, so our case was 1 out of every 5000. EXTREMELY RARE. We were pretty scared.
After a long process to try to save my wife's uterus, of which I won't go into detail but which included several operations and treatment with Methotrexate (a chemotherapy agent and immune system suppressant used to treat cancer, autoimmune diseases, ectopic pregnancy, and for medical abortions), and after 40 days in hospital (we entered the hospital during winter and left in spring), the treatment didn't prosper and evolved into massive bleeding.
Doctors tried all sorts of things to stop the hemorrhage, which was profuse and massive and kept us very busy for a couple of hours, only to decide they couldn't stop it, thus my wife had to undergo an urgent hysterectomy, this is an operation were the uterus is partially or totally extracted. In our case it was a total hysterectomy, she would never be able to bear children.
The operation went without complications, although she came out of it very weak and having lost more than half the blood in her body. Blood transfusions ensued, and after some complex hours in which her death was very tangible and hovered above us in the room where she was staying while I held her hand , she finally left the danger zone. I remember looking at her, eyes rolled up and white because of the morphine, her skin pale as a sheet of paper due to the lack of blood in her body, and not being able to "see" the future without her by my side. I'm not a religious man, so there was no praying, but it certainly was a belief challenging situation in which head and soul raced in every direction trying to look for an answer or a way of helping. There of course was nothing I could do further than sit by her side and hold her hand. Helplessness acquired a new meaning for me.
A couple of days later we went home, and once we had recovered some sleep we obviously discussed the situation and started looking at different options in order to fill the house with children. Even though it had been tragic, the truth is that I was very happy for the outcome, my wife was alive...