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What do I do if I think I'm pregnant?
Three things need to be done the minute you miss a menstrual period. You need to get one of the urine stick tests. If that is positive, you need to get a quantitative blood pregnancy test [called an HCG test]. The third thing is a vaginal ultrasound to make sure the baby is in the womb.
We have one, sometimes two, teaching sessions with every patient who comes for tubal ligation reversal about this question. The big concern is the risk of ectopic [tubular] pregnancy is greater after tubal ligation reversal than if your tubes had never been tied. Ectopic pregnancies can be dangerous, even rarely fatal, but that is not why we are so concerned. If you catch an ectopic pregnancy early, it can be treated with medicine and the tube is saved.
Early detection of an ectopic pregnancy means that it almost always can be treated without surgery. The tests need to be completed in the first week or two after you miss your period. Sometimes our tubal reversal patients forget these things that we tell them about early pregnancy detection and I tell them to call us if that happens. All our tubal reversal patients are given a pager number that they can use to call us for advice any time they want.
We have just complted a review of all our patients that we revesed in the year 2006. The risk of ectopic is less than 2% in our patients probably because we not only sew our patient’s tubes together, we sew them open. The generally accepted ectopic pregnancy rate for standard meathods of tubal reversal is 6%, ours is less than 2%.
See Also:
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What do I do if I think I'm pregnant?
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