They set the procedure up quickly for September 20th with another doctor. A “D&C” is a dilation and curettage and is typically used to remove tissue from the uterus for diagnostics or clear the lining of the uterus after a miscarriage. It’s done under anesthesia and doesn’t last long. I think I was back in my room about 30 minutes after everything started. In Mason’s words – “I didn’t even have time to get food!”
The doctor came to talk with us before we were discharged to say everything had gone smoothly and my HCG levels were down to 70, but the initial pathology results were strange. She expected to see something called “chorionic villi” (growths you would find in a placenta and would indicate new pregnancy tissue), but my tissue sample didn’t show that. She said they would send it off for further testing and that they still couldn’t rule out an ectopic pregnancy, which a D&C would not have cured. I reiterated to her again how much I didn’t understand how I could have gotten pregnant in the first place and how none of this made sense, and asked that pathology do whatever needed to be done to figure this out. And then I started researching. And researching. I continued the research I had started the week of my positive pregnancy test, desperately searching for anything that would cause HCG levels to rise if a woman wasn’t pregnant. That’s how sure I was that this was not a pregnancy. And that’s when I finally allowed myself to read about Gestational Trophoblastic disease, the search result that kept popping up when this first happened and I was too scared to read. And as I waited for my pathology results and continued to live my life, I kept this information in the back of my mind, trying to ignore the nagging feeling that maybe this is what I actually had, telling myself the chances were so slim that I didn’t need to worry about it, but utterly failing at convincing myself.
Life One Step At A Time 