Ectopic Pregnancy

This happened four years ago. We paid off the substantial bills for two hospitals and an ambulance a year later, while in the middle of a major house renovation, and I wrote about it a year after that.  

The cramps first started in December, one evening before a work party. We had both showered so we had a quickie. At the end, instead of an orgasm I was struck by a wave of vicious cramps that shut down my abdomen. Cy was confused and apologetic as I writhed on the bed. Gasping, I sent him away, and emerged in a dress and tights thirty minutes later, still in pain. 

A few more episodes struck aggressively over the next few weeks, and the bleeding started mid-month, first spotting then a regular flow that at some point started soaking through pads like my period never did. 

I was convinced my IUD was misbehaving. I did one quick Google, found nothing substantive, and left it at that. The thought of my warmhearted doctor fiddling with the IUD like she had when she inserted it, sending incredible pain through my pelvis and causing months of side effects, made my skin crawl, so I did nothing. 

Finally I made a doctor's appointment because the bleeding was so heavy and the cramps left me supine on the ottoman trying to find a position where the muscles in my stomach would leave me alone. I decided my solution was to get that little U of metal and plastic removed and then discuss other options. My appointment was in two days. 

But that night started to feel like a fever dream, the pain spreading upward like terrible suspenders into my shoulder. I started having dizzy spells and feeling too hot, too cold. While editing pages after hours at work I had to go lie down on the floor of the manager's office a couple times until the desire to faint had passed. After going to a city council meeting, I made it home, groaning as I shifted my carcass out of the car. I ate no dinner and went straight to the shower, and when that felt too intense and black spots danced before my eyes, I sat down and had a bath. 

Cy sounded more worried than I'd ever heard him, but I waved him off. I have an appointment. I can't go in any earlier, I have to get the paper out tomorrow morning. The ER is way too expensive, and what if I get a male doctor? He won't know what to do with me.

Sleep was hard to come by and after a few uneasy hours I came awake unable to breathe deeply or lay comfortably because of the pain in my shoulder. I took a piss, took a drink, and Cy was awake, and asserted again that we needed to go in. This time I said yes, I do need to go to the ER. 

We packed water bottles, books, and snacks, me distrustful of hospitals and wait times and how long we'd be away. No bra, no contacts, I walked into the ER with Cy, and a nurse I knew greeted us. He realized I was a mess. IUD issues, I told him. 

Other men checked me into the ER, took vitals, tried to absorb the information I provided. To my relief a female NP soon parted the curtain and started questioning me. She didn't seem to take in what I was saying though, or I wasn't explaining my symptoms in the right order, because she was most concerned about the shoulder pain, not the wracking cramps. She asked if I had been doing manual labor that made me sore. Yes, I've been putting in flooring in the house I just bought but I am intimately familiar with the sweet feeling of muscle soreness, I tried to say. 

A technician ushered me toward the X-ray room and I thought about all those articles I had read about hospitals performing unnecessary tests. No, I don't need that, I told him. The NP came back in and demanded to know why. I told her I wasn't concerned with my bones, it was my abdomen that was killing me. I peed in a cup. Got an EKG, although I suspected I didn't need that either. 

Twenty minutes later she returned and her demeanor had totally changed. Maybe I was no longer the hypochondriac with a sore upper body. 

She told me I was pregnant. I burst into tears. She explained it was most likely ectopic, outside the uterus, and they didn't have an ultrasound technician on call. She said she was going to send me to Rexburg (the hospital there is just a baby factory, she said) so we got ready to head west. 

At the desk they confirmed with us that Cy was fine with transporting me, but then my ears started ringing, my vision blurred, and I bent over to right myself. Their voices, sounding far away, grew loud with alarm, and they sat me in a wheelchair as I shook and sweated and heaved into a bag. I had apparently almost dropped to the ground, almost hit my head on the desk, but Cy caught me in time.

They put an IV in me and watched my color return. Ambulance it is, then. Two EMTs hustled me onto a stretcher and into the back of the vehicle. One of them, a sturdy young woman, stayed back with me and murmured comforting things and had me gauge my pain. She warmed up the little room until I stopped shivering. She pumped a dose of painkiller into my IV. Isn't fentanyl a pretty gnarly opioid? I asked. She considered this and then said she preferred it to morphine. 

I drowsed a little but didn't feel much of my pain being killed. I saw the headlights of my Subaru through the back window as Cy chased us going 80 to Rexburg. 

There, the first nurse I interacted with called my malignant growth a baby and chastised me for leaving the ultrasound tech waiting for an hour. I was on enough drugs to knock out a horse, having asked the EMT for more to little effect. I decided I didn't need to apologize to her. 

The ultrasound tech was younger than me and very apologetic for the extreme discomfort she was putting me in. She said nothing about the mysterious clouds showing on her screen, so I just gritted my teeth and dug my nails in as she manipulated the wand inside me. 

An unpleasant male doctor with a flat head, a shapeless belly, and a stilted manner asked me a couple questions but then tagged out - the specialist had arrived. He was much more pleasant without any air of judgment and was the first person to lay out possible solutions as well as the cause of the pregnancy. 

He was weighing the options but felt that surgery was the right move. Cy agreed to talk to my mom and call the newspaper to help direct them a little bit, as I gave up the last shred of control I had over the situation. They put drugs into me that had me passing out as they wheeled me into the operating room. 

I came to with a sense of noise and light. The word salad bombarding my brain eventually coalesced into It went well. It wasn't ruptured.

I felt hazy and quiet and hurt. Cy sat by the bed feeding me water, gently scratching my back under the hospital gown and letting me know what my friends and family had said while I was under. 

Finally the specialist returned and showed me a sheaf of photos of a red bulbous object inside me. The procedure worked - they drained the blood from my abdomen (the blood that was pushing up into my chest and causing shoulder pain), eliminated the growth, and double and triple checked my reproductive organs. 

He told me they caught it just in time. Ectopic pregnancies can be deadly. I didn't let my mind linger on that. And IUDs seem to increase the chance of ectopic pregnancies. This same thing happened to my wife. Also once you've had one you're more likely to have another. 

Cy later told me he had Googled my symptoms a lot more thoroughly than I had and saw pretty clearly what it was, but didn't want to pressure me. 

I was still hurting but could sense that the badness was gone from my system. I sent out some texts. Asked Cy to grab me a Sprite when he went out - he was clearing starving and running low on fuel after a hungry, intense night and morning. I had dressed myself (slowly) when he returned. An aide wheeled me to the curb where Cy picked me up. Every little bump on the drive shook me with pain but I felt clear-eyed and full of new life. Well, that was something, I thought. 

The Ogre 24

It happens over beers at the Wolf, as so many good things do. Dan mentions he tried to put together an Ogre 24-hour team with some TCSAR buddies but they couldn't do the race as a co-ed team because they didn't have a woman. I swore long ago I would never do the 24 because it always involves water and sleep deprivation but for some reason this time the idea creeps into my skull and bounces around in there. Dan does water stuff - he has the equipment and knowledge, so I can just be a passive byfloater. And while I reliably fall apart during the Ogre, that's always with Cy, and there's something to be said for doing an adventure with people who are not your main source of emotional stability. You have to keep the bad attitude inside. 

I pour another beer from the pitcher and tell Dan I want in. Cy raises an eyebrow. 

We start a text thread with the two Jackson boys. It comes to light that Ian doesn't even own a bike, Steve doesn't own one that's appropriate for the race, and Dan has only recently purchased a Surly, but is not really a cyclist. I propose a test run where we bushwhack from Teton Canyon to Spring Creek, ride Aspen, then take gravel roads back. It's a pretty good indicator of the Ogre, and I feel optimistic, ish. 

The race starts at 2 p.m. on a Saturday, a time frame that lends itself to a lot of dicking around. We make piles, allocate piles, pack piles, put glow sticks on our watercraft, pare down our first aid supplies, attend to one poorly maintained borrowed bike, prepare for the different transition areas and different disciplines. Then all of a sudden it's noon and we have to go to check-in and start studying our map. (The venue is a block from Dan's house and we're the only local team competing, which certainly counts for something.) 

We start with a neutral rollout along the bike path to 5500 and I caution the boys not to crash - there are a lot of really sketchy bikers in the pack. Then the race starts and after pacelining down the gravel road and wading with bikes through the confluence of Fox Creek and Teton River we've taken the lead, weirdly. We're the first team to arrive at Henderson Canyon, drop our bikes, and start trekking. There's a trail network here that's not on any map so I make some navigation guesses based on familiarity. We are being watched online, theoretically, our little dots moving in real time, and I wonder if our friends and family can see that we're doing well. I'm filled with the optimistic glow that happens literally every year when I mistakenly entertain the idea that the Ogre can be won in the first couple of hours. Before I remember that winning teams have the ability to somehow walk with laser focus from one checkpoint to the next instead of dithering around trying to find the orange flags in the woods. 

We hike up through wildflowers and down steep ravines grabbing checkpoints (and a moose paddle) and for the first of many times, I'm grateful that Ian and Dan can handle the navigation because I never learned how to read a compass and can't associate small physical landmarks with their paper counterparts - minor highpoint, periodic creek, steep ridge, etc. I know the area better than anyone and am moving fast, and that's good enough for me.

After a long interlude (during which time we encounter several enraged grouse) of trying to find a tricky checkpoint in the inaptly named Lizard Lake, we run down out of Mahogany across half the valley to the South Bates river access. The sun is setting, I'm playing pop music on my phone, we're passing tons of people. I'm not even mad about the road miles. 

After inflating our duckies and donning PFDs and dry gear (thanks Sarah) we get on the river and paddle a frenzied quarter mile upstream to snag a CP dangling from a willow on the bank. Once we point it downstream I begin to realize how unpleasant this endeavor will be. Twelve miles of nonstop paddling down slow moving water in the dark and cold, covering far more ground than necessary because of the river's incessant meandering, Ian and Steve speeding away in their boat because I'm not a good paddler, and the river is sooooo boring and my gloved hands and sleeves are soaked quickly and with every pass into the water my paddle squeaks against the rubber kayak and is very annoying and embarrassing. 

Two eternal hours later we take out at Packsaddle where many teams are recovering, shivering in front of the fire, drinking coffee, facing the long night ahead of them. After everyone's hands stop shaking we deflate and pack up our kayaks and schlep them into the Uhaul, change into warm clothes and socks, and strap on our bike lights. We depart around midnight. The race director said he was stuck there until 5 a.m. waiting for people in basketball shorts on stand up paddleboards to recover from the first blush of hypothermia and start biking.

We begin the not insubstantial climb from the river bottom back into the Big Holes, up gravel roads and double track to the cirque of Relay Ridge. It's a long ride, with several extended breaks to accommodate the mixed pace of the group. Once we reach the cirque, we drop bikes and start wandering around. There are quite a few CPs up here but we decide to be kind to ourselves and only shoot for a few of them, enough to allow the sun to rise so we don't have to ride downhill in the dark. At first morning light I have a donut and a can of iced coffee, which everyone is deeply envious of. 

I tell the boys that if Abby and Jason are awake, they're probably watching the livetracker and are happy to see that we're at a stunning overlook of the whole valley and the Teton range at sunrise - that's the kind of race directors they are. 

After a couple of scenic CPs on cliff bands and nearly an hour of flustered searching for one last flag in a sinkhole (which turns out to be a very big obvious sinkhole that we manage to overlook for too long) we head back to our bikes and point it downhill, accidentally blowing by a few intersections before making it down the steep technical final section to the Horseshoe-Packsaddle road. No injuries, no mechanicals. Shocking. 

We eat lunch next to a creek, slap on bug spray and not enough sunscreen, and I promise to lead them out for the rest of the ride - it's the Horseshoe Canyon network, which I know well, and I'm still feeling pretty good. It's nice being an asset and not at all a weak link. We catch a few more CPs and Dan, who is deeply unflappable and hasn't struggled at all during the race, admits to me that riding singletrack after twenty hours in motion is really taxing his concentration and bike skills. It's a moment that I hold onto to share later with friends, most of whom can count on one or two fingers the number of times they've seen him crack. 

I feel grateful for the many many many hours of hard mountain biking I've done. It's a huge advantage to be able to ride on autopilot when dealing with cumulative fatigue. 

The sun is fierce as we do the final unpleasant pedal from Horseshoe to Driggs (not via the most direct route of course because adventure racing). After what feels like five hours of spinning circles down gravel roads and listening to my increasingly noisy drivetrain, we arrive in town and collapse in the grass at the finish line. 

Even though our team name is In It For the Après, our après is shortlived and subdued - a beer each before Steve and Ian drive back to Jackson and I take a nap. 

The next day I feel surprisingly chipper, not really sore at all except for my shoulders. Dan agrees it just feels like the aftermath of a big ski day in Grand Teton National Park. 

We have 24 CPs total. The winning team, which includes two children who have done the Ogre several times and seem to be impeccable navigators, got all 31 CPs. We place fourth in our category and fifth overall out of 30 or so teams. Not too shabby for a group made up of two non-cyclists, one non-boater, and three non-adventure racers. 

This is the only event I keep coming back to. Playing the oldies: 

2016 Ogre 

2017 Ogre 

Cy and I also raced in 2018 and 2019, and did the Covid navigation challenge (poorly) in 2020.