Tubal pregnancy
My first life-threatening event that I’m conscious of happened when I visited a physician’s practice in Giessen, Germany in 1976. As I mentioned before I’ll dig deep into my experience chest.
At that time I was experiencing an unusual prolonged period. Therefore I decided to consult a gynaecologist. He was an elderly man, but that should not have been the cause of his recklessness. During a time frame of 3 weeks, I visited this gynaecologist at least 4 times because the loss of my menstrual blood didn’t stop. Each time I saw him he just told me that if it gets more serious I should come back to his practice.
At that time I just was astonished of having such a prolonged period and trusted his judgment. My boyfriend who studied dentistry at that time didn’t worry either until he saw me lying in bed deadly pale and almost lifeless on a Monday afternoon. That aroused his suspicion and he asked me what the gynaecologist whom I had seen again on that same day had told me. I repeated the same words he had said to me so many times before “come back if it gets more seriousâ€. I was hardly able to say anything anymore because there was almost no life in my body.
Luckily, on that day my boyfriend made an emergency call to the University Clinic, and I was hurried to the ER room. On the same evening I underwent an emergency operation and the attending physician told me later that if I had arrived an hour later, I would have been dead. During those 3 weeks I had lost so much blood that my body was barely functioning properly anymore.
The cause for the continued vaginal bleeding had been that a fertilized egg had nestled outside of my uterus in one of the Fallopian tubes, which later tore apart. A simple pregnancy test would have shown that I had been pregnant. But the gynaecologist abstained from having me done this test. And he didn’t transfer me to another physician or hospital so that someone else could have examined me further.