Chris and Jenni

UPDATE: Charlotte (midwife) told me that she would feel better if I went ahead to the ER to have a chest x-ray.  :( So I will be able to rule out the worst tonight.

Today we had a little bit of an adventure that I didn’t see coming. I had just gotten with the kids in the morning and was sitting down, thinking about getting some breakfast for the kids when I started to feeling my heart racing really fast. This is always a freaky feeling but it went away when I sat up and took a deep breath. But then I felt a real heaviness on my chest and a shortness of breath, so I would try to breathe deep and there was a pain in the center of my chest every time I would breathe. I have never experienced this before, it didn’t go away for well over an hour while I was running about getting breakfast for the kids, so I decided I better call my midwife. She seemed very concerned and told that I needed to see my doctor today. She told me that she actually had a healthy 22 year old patient in the hospital with the same symptoms, she had a blood clot in her lung, which can kill you. Of course by this time the pain had gone away and I was feeling a little foolish, but knowing that chest pain is nothing to mess with, I decided to swallow my pride and head to the naturopath to explain my drama. You know what’s funny, if I didn’t have children, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have gone to the doctor, but the thought of dying in my children’s presence and leaving them without a mother pretty much causes me to take no chances (I’m sure my mother appreciates this;).

So Chris took half the day off (thanks to his wonderful work, where they are so flexible when these things happen), came and got me and the kids and we to see the naturopath. Anyway, long story short, he ended up giving me (my first) EKG and drawing my blood and testing the oxygen level in my blood. Everything looked good, his biggest concern was that I have a large varicose vein on the back of my leg which is really sensitive right now because of the pregnancy, so the blood draw is to see if there is clotting in my blood (still haven’t heard results from that but he is thinking it will come back normal). Sometimes with varicose veins blood can pool in the large veins and then head upward and take up lodging in your lung, which you can imagine is not a good thing. After all the poking and proding he thinks that I probably was experiencing some sort of discomfort from my esophagus or otherwise known as heartburn. The weird thing though is that I don’t feel it in my throat like I usually do.

I got home and got a call from the nurse saying that I had to have my blood redrawn, the test is really sensitive and they needed more blood. Thankfully Chris had not headed back to work yet so I was able to go to the lab at the hospital and they drew my blood.

I just heard back from Dr Seth and he said that the clotting in my blood was a little elevated, but that can be normal during pregnancy. But I’ve started to have the pain when I breathe again. Hmmm. Well, he’s going to keep a close watch on me for the next couple days and I will definitely go in if my symptoms increase, if I do go in they will do a chest x-ray or a chest scan to see if there is a clot. I was thinking I was completely out of the woods but I guess I’m not, so we could use your prayers, and we will keep you posted on how I’m doing.

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