That Time My Fibroid Almost Killed Me - Day 1

Warning: This story contains graphic details and may not be suited for all audiences.

It was late June 2016.  My husband was mid way through his 4 days at home after his first shift back in Fort McMurray after the Wildfires devastated the community.  He had been off for 6 weeks after the fire, and had finally returned to work mid June.

We were one of the lucky ones, having little to no damage to our home.  We were three streets over from a whole community that burned.  All our house needed was a good cleaning and a roof inspection pretty much.

Thursday of the week I was at work and had an little bit of an odd start to what I thought was my menstrual cycle.  My menstrual cycles usually start off light and then end up heavy towards the middle, and then light again at the end.  This odd heavy bleed didn't really worry me because odd heavy bleeding is not unusual after the many years of messed up cycles.

I managed to run to the ladies room, with supplies in hand, and got there about 20 seconds too late, blood had already made if off the pad and all over my panties. I passed a clot about the size of a quarter.  That wasn't a massive clot in my mind, it just came very unexpectedly.  I got as cleaned up as I could and left for home as it was the end of the day.

I went home and spent a normal evening at home.  The next morning I work up and got ready for work.  As I was heading out to the kitchen to make some breakfast, I felt a huge clot making it's way down.  Although I had a tampon and a long pad on, I could feel the pad filling up instantly.  I rushed to the washroom and sure enough, I had soaked through the tampon, the whole pad and my panties. The clot that had passed was about the size of my palm.

I decided that maybe I would just wait it out for a bit before I headed in to work, which is a 45 minute car ride with only two pit stops along the way.  Thankfully I had made the right decision.  Within 10 minutes of cleaning up the first mess, I had more and more and more clots pass.  At one point I had gone in to tell my husband I would most likely need to go to emergency.  He was in the bath tub at the time.  He had told me that we could go whenever I wanted.  I decided to wait for a bit to see if it would slow down.

At about an hour into it starting, I had a massive clot and fall which soaked my pants down to my knees in blood.  That is when I called it quits and decided we needed to go to emergency.  I swear my husband turned white as a ghost when he saw the amount of blood I had lost, and he was an former firefighter/EMT.  I estimated that I lost about a liter of blood the first day.

After cleaning up for what seemed like the 20th time that morning and going through about 40 pads, I packed a bag and headed to the hospital.  In my mind I assumed I would be hospitalized, so packaging a bag of pads, tampons, extra clothes, toiletries, water and so on was the first thing that came to my mind.

After a 45 minute drive in to town, my husband dropped me at emerg and went to find a parking spot.  This was our first trip to the Kamloops hospital.  We hadn't realized that parking there was as scarce as a Unicorn sitting on a four leaf clover.  It took my husband a good bunch of time to find a parking spot.  I checked in to emerg while he was looking.  They sent us to the main section of emerg, where we waited about an hour (not a bad wait) to get in to the back. By this time the bleeding had stopped.

After about 2 minutes a male doctor came in to determine why I was there today.  He asked me a bunch of questions, got me some blood work and basically told me it was a "heavy period" and that I would need to get an ultrasound to which he would put in a referral.  I explained to him that I have had heavy periods my whole life, and that I had lost about a liter of blood in a couple of hours.  This was different.  I could tell that he thought I was exaggerating.  He basically told me to go home and wait it out and that there wasn't anything he could do, or give me to make it stop.  I had voiced concern that I was already anemic, and how this could effect my levels, and he told me not to worry.

We headed for home, stopping on the way home to pick up some stuff to make hamburgers for supper as I was craving red meat (sure fire sign that my iron was low).  I was pretty exhausted by the time I made it home that I just ate some supper and went straight to bed.  No more bleeding that night, thank goodness.

Day 2 coming in next blog post...