Yeah, I know. You have heard this before. However, for most of us busy moms, we tend to pay closer attention to others health versus our own.

Now I can’t speak for everyone but I am speaking for myself. You’re probably wondering what happened that made me want to write about this topic? so, Let me tell you. Around 2:30 a.m. the other night I was awakened out of my sleep by pain in my lower back. Also known as “flank pain”. I went to the kitchen and grabbed a water and drank as much as I could before returning to bed.

I knew that the pain was coming from my right kidney. However, I couldn’t figure out why. At first, I thought I had slept the wrong way and maybe the baby was positioned on a nerve. The next day I went to work and I had to drive over an hour to the office that I had a scheduled appointment with. On my way back home the pain was back.

Now, I started to really worry.

As soon as I made it back to my side of town I stopped by the local urgent care clinic. I filled out all of the paperwork only to be told they would see me. Yep. I was told due to being pregnant they would not see me. (Liability)  because I was pregnant. Mind you, all I needed the doctor to do was to test my urine to make sure nothing more serious was going on.

After being turned away, I headed to my OBGYN office. They allowed to me see the triage nurse and they also took a urine sample. Turns out there was indeed something serious going on.

Potential kidney stones.

I was then informed that I needed to head the hospital in Orlando to determine what was going on. By the way…

My husband was out of town for work training in Ohio.

Sheer panic started to set in. How was I supposed to go to the hospital in Orlando with two kids in tow? I quickly realized how important it is to have a tribe when there is no family that lives close by. I will share more about this in another post. After getting my kids situated, I headed to the hospital. The only thing that was going through my mind was…

I hope my baby is ok.

On top of that, I was praying that it wouldn’t be too serious about where I would have to stay in the hospital overnight. Normally in a situation like this, I would have just put on my big girl panties and pushed through the pain and just waited until my husband return. Then I would have gone to the doctor. Because I decided to listen to my body, I found out that I didn’t have kidney stones. Instead, I had a bacterial infection caused by a urinary tract infection. (UTI)

Which I had absolutely NO SYMPTOMS of! Trust me, I have had my share of UTI’s so I know what to look for when I think I may have one. This one snuck up on me and apparently, it has been going on for a while because now the infection is affecting my kidneys. After numerous tests and an ultrasound of my bladder and kidneys, my report came back good. No kidney stones. The best thing that happened while I was there was I heard baby brown’s heartbeat. It was 157 beats per minute and the baby was doing just fine.

I had the biggest sigh of relief!

The bad news was that I had to get a shot of antibiotics before they released me. Hunny, let me tell you a 22 gauge needle being inserted into you right butt cheek was not pleasant AT ALL. Not to mention the antibiotics was super thick! After all of that, I was released and I was able to pick up my babies and sleep in my own bed.

To be honest, I believe that if I would have waited another day, I would probably end up in the hospital.  Ladies, pregnant or not…listen to your body. You are no help to others if you don’t take the time to take care of yourself. I could have easily dismissed the pain as gas, or simply the fact that I haven’t been drinking enough water. (self-diagnosing) I’m happy that I didn’t and I made the time to take care of myself.

You need to do the same.

 

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