Please can someone help me. Im in so much pain and I dont know what to do.

[spookycharlotte121]

I have had horrible pains all day..... they feel like periiod pains. As the day has progressed they have been getting worse and worse.

Nurofen isnt touching it. Im totally exhausted by it and just want to sleep. Im sat here crying because I dont know what to do. I took painkillers nearly an hour ago anf they just arent working and I just want to sleep.

yes, if you read the thread you can see that until the doctor did the test there was nothing like a straight answer to the when did you have sex, when did you have your period questions. and this is from a woman who was genuinely scared by her pain, presumably more scared of being pregnant...

then you have to factor in the wait for a proper betahcg coming back, so docs sometimes use a normal test, which isn't as accurate. but actually, a lot of the time they just aren't interested and assume it's a miscarriage. nhs direct clearly fucked up last night, as did the gp today as well.

there was a woman on here who went to a and e, got sent to obstetrics and the obs did an internal exam, pronounced her cervix closed and on that basis sent her home with a confirmed non-ectopic.... thank god we sent her back to another hospital because she nearly bled out by the time she got to the waiting room.

i think i have probably written 'right sorry to tell you this but the doctor was in no position to rule out ep on basis of x, y or z' on this site twenty times. it's amazing, really, the way that doctors listen to the symptoms rather than the patients. but of course if they're not communicating with the patients, they're not asking the right questions.

am still fervently hoping that it's a corpus luteum cyst playing up and all is well.

I think spooky won't mind; she's FB'd staying in overnight so please no-one panic if she doesn't update MN for a while

oops forgot the quote marks... she facebooked "staying in over night" - the rest was from me!

My baby wakes up singing as well. He is 10 now though ...

My problems were with GPs. Had two ectopics both misdiagnosed by two different GPs. First one was awful. Second time, knew to ignore the GP. A&E wonderful both times.

agree about the algorithm re: poss ectopic.

aitch do you work for nhs direct? i work at nhs24... we always ask 'is there any chance you may be pregnant' and if the patient's response is yes or uncertain, it's taken to ectopic/contraction questions and prioritised based on that.

i have a feeling that SC's pain was central rather than one-sided when she called. it became more left-sided around the time the GP was calling. i also asked her if she had shoulder pain and she didn't answer so i took that to mean no. she seemed certain she wasn't pregnant so i reckon that nhs direct's outcome of queuing but getting GP to call her within the hour was about right. that's if she answered their questions the same way she answered ours.

the GP however sounded slack. by that time it was left sided, pain through to the back on that side and she felt sick.

my problem is with GPs too, they tend to take it symptom by symptom, rather than holistically... i understand why they do that but sometimes, you've got to look at the bigger picture or you miss things.

no, i don't work for anyone nhs-y, i've just had two eps.

she said the pain was on the lhs in her first posts. and shoulder tip pain is a symptom of a burst fallopian tube rather than an ectopic pg per se so not a clincher in any sense. the only thing about shoulder tip pain is that if you're feeling it you're in deep shit. if the algorithm is over-weighting shoulder tip pain it needs to be changed pronto, and if the operator can't be more exact about whether someone could be pregnant then that is highly dangerous. she was never certain that she couldn't be pregnant, she was evasive in the extreme on dates etc and perhaps that should be taken as a sign of denial rather than denial.

sorry, just got a message from Charlotte; she says she's been admitted and is having tests done and they are scanning her in the morning.

She says thank you for all your advice and support

give her our fondest, lewis. at least if she takes a turn for the worse she's in the best place.

Good to hear she is where she might get some help.

I've just caught up with this thread after lurking last night... thinking "gosh isn't Aitch bossy and a bit nosey".

And thank god she is. Well done Aitch. Even if it's not an EP you were quite right to keep on. Because it might have been.

I am shocked at the stories on here. At an early scan I had with DS (5 weeks) the doctor said "I don't think it's ectopic - there's a clear mass in your uterus that I'm pretty sure's the baby". I just assumed that all doctors check pregnant women for EP and all women with adominal pain as standard

someone said you work for nhs direct aitch... they must have picked it up wrong.

you're right, she DID say more to the left initially. just checked. at NHS24 the pregnancy question is pretty straight forward- is there any chance you could be pregnant? any uncertainty and you're onto the poss miscarriage/ectopic/in labour questions. if they say NO then you have to take their word for it. if they falter or aren't sure, then you assume they are. there's no other way to do it. i can only speak for nhs24, i don't know how nhs direct question women of child bearing age with abdo pain. certainly, if i am call streaming them, if i have any doubts, i get advice from a senior clinician and if it IS queued, a senior clinician monitors and prioritises the call comments/call streaming questions independently anyway. in my experience it's not 'highly dangerous'.

no, i have nothing to do with nhsdirect, and i don't think charlotte phoned them anyway because she's not in scotland. i just forget which is which so often refer to the wrong name, direct or 24, as they are synonymous.

not saying that the way you behave is highly dangerous, it sounds like you err firmly on the side of caution. but it's hard to think that given the line of questioning on here that charlotte would have been anything other than faltering with a 'no' to the operator she spoke to.

and as i recall... five years ago the english nhs site didn't actually have a lower abdomen on its self diagnosis bit of its website. i imagine that's been fixed now but it caused some consternation when it was spotted by a few of us who'd had eps.

Wishing you some pain free sleep and some answers in the morning Charlotte.

Hi I hope your okay Spooky
I am recovering from an ectopic and reading the posts alarm bells were ringing. I am disgusted (and very thankfull mind you) of the nhs. It took 6 days between nhs 24, 2 a&e's, 1 obs, 1 midwife, 2 gynae consultants, 2 hospital admissions and emergency surgery later to discover I had an ep.
I think that the nhs really needs to look at how they do things. In the first a&e the doc had never experienced an ectopic but they were the first and correct diagnosis, it just went downhill from there.
I knew there was something wrong the minute I got pregnant I had pain in the left side which was intermittent, the spotting, then the shoulder pain but was made to feel as if I was exaggerating.
nhs 24 advised me to take paracetamol and they were not concerned because I could speak properly through the pain!
I really hope you are ok Spooky, will be thinking of you xx

nhs direct is england and nhs24 is scotland.

they're the same kettle of fish but totally different systems.

that's interesting about the nhsdirect website. being in scotland, i've never used it but that's shocking. i don't think much of the self diagnosing concept anyway.

anyway, she's in the right place now so hopefully she's ok.

I just want to wish spooky all the best, and hope she gets the treatment she needs.

There is lots of useful information on here about ectopic pregnancies, and I wanted to add that in some cases there is no pain with an ep. I had one 3 years ago, the only signs were a BFP and a little bleeding at 6 weeks- but I knew something was wrong and my fab community MW said he thought I needed a scan. A&E didn't have a clue but I badgered them into sending me to EPU for a scan. Many blood tests and scans later the consultant was finally able to confirm an ep and I had an op to remove ep and tube.

Sometimes, late at night, I wonder what would have happened if I'd not been a stubborn cow that day in A&E. If in any doubt at all - keep pushing for that scan and the blood tests.

Wishing you all the best Spooky x

hope home and better soon SC whatever

Hope for a speedy recover, charlotte, whatever the cause of your pain x

Thinking of you this morning Spooky. x

thanks for the update lewis.. give her our best and keep us posted x

maybe the scottish one is just better, then, blinks?

yup, pip, i had no serious pain with my first ep, just a wee niggle, i wouldn't have thought anything of it had it not been for the blood. (which was bright red, btw, so not at all the classic prune juice). they really should be on the lookout from the moment a woman walks in with either bleeding or pain.

Hoping Spooky is OK. Having been rather drastically misinformed by NHS direct I no longer use them much, sadly...but then it's possible to be misdiagnosed by anyone, a doctor, a hospital, etc etc

It was mostly the way I was told repeatedly, 'Trust me, you do NOT have so-and-so' that upset me so much, when I did have it and was describing the symptoms accurately...had I listened, I'd have been in deep trouble.

It's just another fallible system really. Nothing is perfect and I am sure it has been a huge benefit for many people.

thinking of you spooky x

hopefully the fact that we've heard nothing means that she's had a good night and it's just been some endo tearing or cyst rupturing. it's a tough thing, an ep, i wouldn't want it happening to anyone. but we are here for you if that's what it is, charlotte.