Robyn and I spent a few hours at the Emergency Room on Tuesday night.
This story begins last week when we had to return to Labor & Delivery in Morristown on Thursday night. The mommy-to-be was experiencing contractions that seemed to be becoming more frequent as the evening progressed. I made the call to call the doctor and when she called back, we were told to return to the L&D for additional monitoring. So, we hopped in the car and drove over to Morristown where the nurses attached monitors for the fetal heartbeats and for contractions. There were a few contractions, but nothing that the doctors found to be too severe, so they gave a shot of [url=http://www.twinslist.org/terbquestions.html]terbutaline[/url] to stop them and perscribed oral doses as well. After about 2 hours, we were sent home.
On Sunday, Robyn noticed that her pulse was unusually high throughout the day. This is a common side effect of terbutaline, so we weren’t too worried. However, in the afternoon she was growing concerned, so she called the doctor and was told to stop taking the medication (since it’s not shown to be effective in stopping pre-term labor anyway) and unless something felt very wrong, we would see the doctor on Monday morning at our scheduled appointment. Her heart rate stayed high for the rest of the day even though she was staying in bed.
On Monday, we saw our regular OB and most everything looked good as far as mommy and babies were concerned, except for Robyn’s pulse which was still higher than it should be. The doctor explained that an elevated heart rate is common in the third trimester, but if Robyn was having any other symptoms, she should contact a cardiologist. We returned home and I went to work for the rest of the day.
On Tuesday, her heart rate not having slowed down much, Robyn called her primary care doctor and made an appointment to come by later in the day. I left work at the appropriate time to pick her up at home and then we headed over to the doctor’s office in Morristown. Since his specialty is vascular, he did a regular workup plus took an EKG and scanned her legs for any blood clots thinking that she may have an embolism of some kind. Having found nothing of any importance and having spoken to a doctor from Robyn’s OB practice, he explained that the only thing that he could do in good conscience was to send us over to the ER and have them look at her. That wasn’t what we wanted to hear, but in order to rule out anything bad, we followed his suggestion and took the short ride over to the Morristown ER.
Once there, they quickly took Robyn’s info and settled her into a bed. They took some blood, did another EKG and hooked her to a heart and pulse-ox monitor while calling in a consult with the pulmonologist on call. I was surprised at how nice everyone was while also being very quick to respond to the situation.
Once the pulmonologist came he assured us that the test results he had seen so far did not indicate an obvious [url=http://www.emedicine.com/emerg/topic490.htm]pulmonary embolism[/url], but he listened closely to Robyn’s heart and lungs and asked a lot of questions about her symptoms. After this, he explained that the blood tests are not a very accurate measure of the possibility of a PE, especially in pregnant women, so he suggested a CAT scan in order to rule this out with greater certaintly. We weren’t please to hear this suggestion because of the babies, but he assured us that they would shield them as best they could and that the benefits of the CAT scan outweighed the risks, so we agreed.
A short time later, they wheeled Robyn up to the CAT scan and she was back in about 20 minutes or so. One thing that the characters in “ER” do have in common with the real ER is that the patients are always annoyed by the long wait. Eventually, the chief resident came by and told us that he had spoken with several other doctors and was very confident that there was no PE. He attributed the increased heart rate to the pregnancy and told us to watch for any other symptoms. After giving the results to Robyn’s OB, he told us that she was free to go. Of course, we had to wait around quite a while for the discharge to be official.