Adventures in Labor & Delivery

It's not a secret that I can be a bit of a nervous nellie. During this pregnancy I have tried to remain calm about the strange sensations and changes in my body as I was advised by my doctor that things would feel a little weird sometimes and still be perfectly normal. So between back pain and hunger pangs and feeling like I'd done 30000 crunches (which I assure you, is nowhere near the true number of crunches I've done - zero), I've just taken it all in stride as part of this 9-month process. Keeping my eye on the prize, the beautiful healthy baby I'm expecting after all of this, I've talked myself off the ledge of true anxiety more than once.

Except for last Thursday night.

While sitting on the bus home that night, I started to feel contractions. Not the usual Braxton-Hicks which have been plaguing me daily for about 15 weeks, but actual menstrual-cramp type contractions that started in my lower abdomen and wrapped around to my lower back. Everything I read, from multiple sources I consider reputable, said that this can be a sign of pre-term labor. At 31 weeks, I am certainly not ready for this baby to come out! His/her lungs are not adequately developed, and a baby born at 31 weeks would need to spend approximately a month in the NICU, a prospect that I would not wish upon any baby (or parent!). Although nervous, I talked myself off the Anxiety Ledge, my friends, because it was just the one time and it went away on its own.

Two hours later, again while sitting and not exerting myself in any way, I started feeling the cramps. I told Raph about it at that point, but we just decided to wait and see if they resolved on their own again. I was already drinking a bottle of water, so I just kept on sitting and drinking water until bed time.

I woke up at 1:15 am and felt the cramps again. Raph was asleep, so I quietly talked myself off The Ledge for the third time and quietly consulted my pregnancy books. Sign of pre-term labor, they said. Of course, it could also be nothing. The Ledge, this time, was more difficult to talk myself out of. A little after 2 am, I woke up Raph and told him what was going on. I said the two magic words: "I'm scared" and he was off and running. We got dressed and went to a nearby hospital. It was pouring rain, and we had (luckily) never been to this hospital so we relied on the Garmin GPS to get us there.

Hospitals in the middle of the night are eerie places. We were definitely nervous and freaked out. It took about 40 minutes just to "register" with the hospital, and then I was given a wristband and a cup for a urine sample. I provided this easily enough (yes, being 7+ months pregnant this is never difficult...) and was led into a small room with a hospital bed, where I was hooked up to a fetal heartrate monitor and a contraction monitor. I'm sure there are more scientific names for these, but really they were just little devices strapped to my belly with pink and blue velcro straps. It was immediately determined that the baby's heartrate was excellent, and that I was indeed having contractions. It would be a while to get the results from the urinanalysis, and there was a lot of waiting and answering of medical history questions. They decided to do an internal exam to check for dilation. This was PAINFUL. I didn't expect it to be so painful! But it was worth it in the end - I was NOT dilating, which was the best news we could have gotten. It's the reason we went to the hospital in the first place.

After all of this, they told me I was dehydrated, which is apparently the main cause of having these contractions too early in pregnancy. I can never believe when they tell me this because I drink so much water and spend a ton of time in the loo as it is. MORE WATER?? Yikes.

So - after 3 hours and almost 2 bags of IV fluids, I was discharged from the hospital with the water directive and an antibuiotic prescription (which my doctor later deemed unnecessary). Lessons learned: call the doctor first, no matter what time it is, drink my weight in water daily and loo visits bedamned, and go to the hospital where I'll be delivering because I'll already be in their system and it won't take them 40 minutes to register me!