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Yesterday was the worst day of my life and then the best day of my life… Worst because I thought I might lose my pregnant wife. Best because Carla and the baby survived and are stable.
Thank you to everyone who sent their thoughts and prayers for Carla. It’s been an insane 24 hours…
Carla is stable now and both she and the baby are okay, but it got really fucking bad really fast… Scariest day/night of my life…
Carla is an absolute badass and at the beginning of the slow road to recovery, and I am so damn thankful.
Posting this here for those who’ve been asking what happened:
Carla started feeling weird yesterday afternoon after a nap. We were up all night with our son and had to take him to urgent care in the morning, so we were all resting before going to meet up with the family for Easter Sunday.
When Carla woke up she had some back pain and was very clammy. She was a bit disoriented but still totally coherent. Within 10 minutes she was almost completely unresponsive. Barely conscious. Crazy disoriented. Hardly able to respond even with single words. Zero control of her body. Totally limp in my arms. Vomited.
I called 911 immediately. Paramedics arrived and she was still barely responding and could barely open her eyes. When she did open her eyes she said she couldn’t see, her vision was black. They got her in an ambulance to the hospital. Her BP was insanely low in initial readings, like 55/38… got her to the hospital and BP remained dangerously low. About an hour she appeared to improve a little after multiple rounds of fluids. BP still super low but higher than before. She became lucid and ER staff thought she was stabilizing. She was shivering from the IV and had a bit of back and abdominal pain but it was manageable. They said we’d have to stay the night for monitoring but would be fine to go home tomorrow.
But then she started having severe abdominal and back pain around her shoulder blades. Pain got to the point where she was screaming like crazy. “Worst pain of my life” (and she has an extremely high baseline pain tolerance). I’ve never seen her in such unrelenting agony like that…
The pain kept getting worse and they did additional scans. The ultrasound showed a lot of fluid in her abdomen, likely blood. They started giving her massive blood transfusions and shortly said she needed surgery immediately. They thought it might be a ruptured ovarian cyst but wouldn’t know for sure until they opened her up. Got her into the OR about an hour after that. Doctor said surgery would take an hour…
2.5 hours in the OR the later the doctor finally came out and said Carla and baby were both OK, thank god… longest 2.5 hours of my life...
It turns out they had to do a giant incision down her entire abdomen from too to bottom to find the source of the bleeding (because it was NOT her ovaries or uterus) and bring in a third surgeon who was on call.
They removed **2+ liters** of blood from her abdominal cavity. For context, the average adult woman has about 4.5 liters of blood in their entire body…
They had to remove her spleen because it had ruptured and was the source of the bleeding… the doctors described it as “battlefield medicine” because of the amount of blood in and out and how dicey things got… but thank god both she and the baby are ok.
The doctor’s still don’t know why the spleen ruptured… it was a “non-traumatic” rupture, meaning there was no physical injury to the spleen which caused the rupture (~1 cm). It was a “spontaneous” rupture, which is quite rare apparently. They did note that the spleen was slightly enlarged but also not sure why yet. Waiting for pathology to see if that provides any answers. May have been contributing physiological/mechanical factors from pregnancy but we just don’t know yet.
The reason her shoulder blades were in such intense pain was because blood from the spleen was pooling under her diaphragm, blood is an irritant, and apparently that triggers the phrenic nerve which the brain interprets as pain between and around the shoulder blades.
Multiple surgeons said she was “this close”…thank god we didn’t waste any time. When one of the surgeons checked in on her today, he said she would have been “dead by midnight” without the emergency surgery and splenectomy…
The doctors also all said this combination of circumstances is very rare. Spleens obviously burst all the time, but usually it’s directly related to intense trauma, which was absent here. They said this case is probably going to be in medical journals because it’s so strange.
Carla is still in a lot of pain (we’re not even 24 hours out from the end of the surgery yet), but she’s handling it like an absolute champ. She was sedated and intubated with a ventilator until about 5AM this morning. This afternoon she was already able to get up and go walking multiple times. The pain is really bad, but should hopefully start lessening with each passing day.
It’s going to be a long road to recovery, especially with pregnancy on top of it, but she and the baby are both OK and right now that’s all that matters. One step at a time.
In typical @carlabitcoin fashion, she’s already been cracking jokes and trying to bribe the nurses. She even fired off a tweet while still a bit loopy from the sedatives but now she’s just trying to manage the pain.
Thankful for the great doctors, nurses, and paramedics who saved her life and our baby.
Thanks again to everyone who has reached out and sent their thoughts and prayers. I’m passing along your messages to Carla and they’re very much appreciated.
This still doesn’t seem real. A normal day turned into a nightmare so damn fast…
Hug your loved ones tight. Life is a gift. Don’t take it for granted.
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