Ashleigh ignored a 'sharp' pain in her stomach. Now, she's lucky to be alive

Ashleigh Ehrenfeld was watching her eldest son perform in a school musical when all of a sudden she doubled over in pain.

The 32-year-old mum-of-two thought she was having a miscarriage because it felt like "ridiculously sharp shooting pains".

She tells 9honey Parenting it was like nothing she'd ever experienced and had come at the worst possible time.

READ MORE: The best mattresses for both seasoned and rookie campers

"I couldn't stand, I couldn't sit, I was bending over in so much pain and it basically went for the whole musical, so like 40 minutes."

But instead of taking herself to the hospital, the busy working mum took her son home and carried on with life as usual.

"Nothing else happened after that but then I started getting a lot of bleeding so I went to the GP because I thought maybe I'm pregnant and having a miscarriage."

Ehrenfeld says she and her husband had been trying for a third baby but after taking several pregnancy tests, were sure she wasn't pregnant.

READ MORE: 'Disheartening' act women tradies forced to resort to

But her doctor suggested otherwise.

"He said 'you're definitely pregnant but you've likely miscarried' because I had so much bleeding so he suggested I do another blood test but that came back two days later showing my HCG levels had increased."

With the confusing results Ehrenfeld was sent off for scans to make sure she'd "fully miscarried".

But what she thought would be a quick scan between school drop-off and work, turned out to be the start of a much more complicated situation. 

READ MORE: Laundry detergent mistake leaving clothes with 'oily' stains

"The ultrasound technician was talking to me and all of a sudden she just went quiet and said 'I'm just going to go and get the doctor' and that was really scary."

"I was like what's going on and the first thing I thought was, oh my gosh, do I have cancer?"

But it turned out she had an ectopic pregnancy, where a fertilised egg implants in the wrong place instead of the uterus, occurring in one in every one hundred pregnancies.

But Ehrenfeld's ectopic pregnancy had implanted on her ovary, a much rarer and more dangerous situation, occurring in one in every forty thousand pregnancies.

She says she "would never have thought ectopic in a million years" but doctors insisted she needed "to go straight to hospital" for emergency surgery.

Once at hospital she was told she was lucky to be alive.

"I found out that I was eight weeks pregnant and that it was nothing short of a miracle that it hadn't burst."

"It was very dangerous apparently because if it ruptures you can die."

Ehrenfeld says from there things moved quickly and she realised she wouldn't be picking her son up from school that day.

Doctors rushed her into the operating theatre before she could even say goodbye to her husband.

"I didn't even get to give him a hug or a kiss, I was just whisked away and so then I had all this anxiety that he didn't have any closure if something happened to me."

She says after the operation she worried she might not be able to have any more children.

"They had to take out my whole left fallopian tube and half my ovary so I was like 'what does this look like for my future?'."

She admits, looking back, the day was not at all how she imagined it would play out.

"I was going for this scan and then all of a sudden I was having an operation and there was not enough processing time."

Luckily Ehrenfeld made a quick recovery and was told she could start trying for a baby again six weeks later, once her period had returned. 

"We thought that it would take a while and it might not happen, but it happened straight away and we fell pregnant the first time."

Now she is 12 weeks pregnant and has been given the all clear that so far everything is looking really good.

But she says things could have been very different and has a warning for other women.

"Don't ignore the pain, if you have that level of pain, see someone immediately."