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A heartbeat appeared on the ultrasound
The bleeding
Kelly was playing with her dog when she felt a little weird and started to bleed. It was not a lot, but any amount of blood is not a good thing. The doctor's office told her to get checked at the hospital, and by the time Tom French drove her there she was in a lot of pain and cramping hard. In the triage room, chunks of blood were coming out of her. She thought they were baby parts and that she was having a miscarriage. She was throwing up, and when the doctor came in, he looked scared.
Fear for Kelly
The doctor quietly explained to Tom that something was making it difficult to stop Kelly's bleeding, and if they could not stop it, they might lose her. Kelly heard it. She grabbed Tom's arm as hard as anyone ever had and begged the doctor not to let her die.
The heartbeat
They brought in an ultrasound machine to check the baby. Kelly assumed the baby was long dead. The wand moved around and around, trying to pick up a heartbeat, and there was nothing. She was apologizing to Tom, sure the baby was gone. Then a heartbeat popped up, super fast, like a rabbit. The baby appeared on the screen looking fine and totally oblivious. Kelly's next thought was that she was going to watch her die in front of her.
Doctors eventually stopped the contractions and the bleeding and moved her to a hospital room. They told her to get to 24 weeks, as if they had drawn a line in the sand: reach it, or there was no hope.
How do doctors find a fetal heartbeat?
An ultrasound probe sends sound waves into the body and builds a picture from the echoes, and a beating heart shows up as a flicker. Doppler ultrasound can also turn the movement of blood into sound. A fetal heart beats about twice as fast as an adult's, normally between 110 and 160 beats per minute in later pregnancy according to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.
How did doctors learn to speed fetal lung growth?
Graham Liggins, a New Zealand obstetrician, noticed in the 1960s that lambs born early after steroid injections had better lung function. He and Ross Howie ran a clinical trial in humans, published in Pediatrics in 1972. It showed that giving a mother corticosteroids before an early birth reduced breathing problems and deaths in her baby.
Why can bleeding in pregnancy be so dangerous?
Heavy bleeding in pregnancy can have several causes, including placental abruption, in which the placenta separates early from the wall of the uterus. The uterus has an enormous blood supply, so bleeding there can be fast. Pregnancy increases a mother's blood volume by roughly 40 to 50 percent, which can hide the early signs of blood loss.
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