What she thought was bad period pain turned out to be life-threatening.
Waking at 3am, bleeding and in excruciating pain, Regina “Reggie” Sorensen (née Bird), didn’t realise that her laid-back nature was on the verge of killing her. Thinking she was suffering a painful period, Reggie took two pain-killers and tried to go back to sleep.
Less than 48 hours later, she was rushed to hospital and had emergency surgery for an ectopic pregnancy which almost ended her life.
“I was in agony,” says Reggie, 34. “I saw blood and thought, ‘Oh, my period has come’. I’d been waiting for it to come but I thought, ‘Geez, I’ve never had one this bad!’ It was so painful.”
When she got up at 6am to tend to daughter Mia, who turns one on March 31, Reggie realised the bleeding had become worse.
“I said to Dale, ‘I’m not sure what’s going on — I’ve never had anything like this before’,” says the popular winner of the 2003 Big Brother series.
An emergency
“By the afternoon I realised something was really wrong. There was so much pain inside. I wasn’t feeling well, either. I ended up lying on the couch for most of the day. I tried to get in to see one of the local doctors and I couldn’t,” Reggie explains.
Her husband Dale, 35, called an after-hours doctor, who came to their Gold Coast home at 9.30pm.
“She thought I’d had a miscarriage but I told her I didn’t think I was pregnant.
“Dale mentioned an ectopic pregnancy because the pain was so concentrated on my left side, around the area where the ovary is — but we had no idea.”
The following morning, still in unrelenting pain, Reggie went to her local doctor’s surgery at 8am.
“He did a urine test and he told me it was coming up ‘positive’ for pregnancy. But he said, ‘Something’s not right’, and sent me straight to Pindara Hospital for an emergency scan. “The doctor doing my scan asked if I’d ever had endometriosis and I said no. He then went to speak to another doctor in the emergency department and I was sent straight there.
“The doctor did another urine test and this time it came back negative,” Reggie says. “He said, ‘We don’t think you’re pregnant. Are you sure the first test was positive?’
“So then they called in a gynaecologist and he looked at the scans and straight away they prepped me for surgery.”
For the full story, see this week’s Woman’s Day (on sale March 24).
Search: Read more about Reggie.
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