Hospital visit #2

Today I'm 34 weeks, which is a big milestone as far as preterm deliveries go in our area. From here on out, we should be good to go to deliver at our local hospital instead of Albany as the baby should be big and mature enough to be dealt with in Glens Falls. Phew! Now ideally we will make it another couple of weeks, at least, but not having to head to Albany (an hour away) is certainly progress.

Back to the reason for the title of this post ... Wednesday evening, all was fine and normal until about 9:45 when I started to feel crampy again and something just wasn't right. The cramps were different than last week, they weren't as well defined I guess I would say and I thought that I might have just been having some GI issues. Our instructions are to wait an hour if I have cramping before calling the doctor's office so I told my husband I wasn't feeling great and we started the clock. After an hour, I didn't feel much better, so I spoke with a nurse and she recommended that we wait another hour, just in case it was GI after all. In the next hour, I noticed another change - my stomach was getting hard as a rock every once in a while. We were guessing that these were contractions and I was feeling my uterus (which takes up my entire mid-section at this point) contract. Boo. So just before midnight, we headed into the hospital to get checked, again, for preterm labor and see what next steps were.

On the way to the hospital, I was so nervous my arms and legs were both shaking like crazy. There were a few reasons for my nerves ... the first being that we both knew this baby was not ready to come out and breath on its own yet. The second was I honestly thought that as long as I did nothing for three weeks, that we would breeze through bed rest so this was a curve ball. And I think the final reason for being nervous is I still don't feel like I've properly nested and part of me just doesn't feel ready to bring a baby home yet (we didn't even have mattress pads for the cradle on Wednesday! They came yesterday ...). So here I was shaking like a leaf as my husband drove the ~4 miles into the hospital. Luckily it's a short drive.

We arrived and they hooked me up to the fetal heart and contraction monitors. The heart beat sounded great (yay!) so baby was fine, and they weren't seeing my contractions on the monitor, but they could feel them with their hands (when my stomach would get hard) so I was repositioned and monitored for a while longer. The midwife also checked to see how dilated I was. Luckily, only 2cm again, so that hadn't progressed. With my legs out straight and laying on my back, the contractions became much more obvious on the machine, and at about 2 in the morning, they decided to give me a shot of terbutaline to stop the contractions because they were not chilling out on their own. I felt the effects of the shot almost immediately - my stomach relaxed, but in addition, I felt extremely jittery and my heart rate increased by a ton and I could feel it beating in my ears. I was warned this could happen, so it didn't freak me out, but it certainly wasn't super comfy either. Oh well, as long as the little one was okay.

While I was uncomfortable in the hospital bed (they are terrible, you would think they could be a bit more comfortable!), my husband became familiar with the pull out bed from the chair in the room. Luckily he had thought to pack a bag while I was on the phone with the nurse before we came into the hospital so he had comfy clothes to sleep in and we both were able to take out our contacts. We forgot the toothbrush - next time! Speaking of which, we should probably get a bag packed since we don't know when this is actually going to happen ...

After a fitful night of not much sleep, but thankfully no more contractions, a shift change occurred and I think we may have been forgotten for a while. I got up to use the bathroom at some point and felt my stomach get rock hard again. Damn. I was worried they would make us stay forever since that happened, but since it wasn't accompanied by any sort of cramping, they finally let us go just before 11. I couldn't wait to come home, crawl into bed, and catch up on some sleep!

We learned a valuable lesson though - the hospital has wireless.

So now I'm back on the couch, with a somewhat revised bed rest attitude. I'm now open to the possibility that we may need to head back to the hospital many more times before 36 weeks to shut down the process, and that this is okay. Hopefully it doesn't happen, but it's totally possible. And I also need to get more comfortable with the fact that I may not get to nest anymore before this baby comes, and that has to be okay. Yesterday morning when we were in the hospital, we heard a newborn baby cry and my husband and I both looked at each other and said, "awww ..." That baby sounded so new, small and absolutely precious. Having nested or not, I hope we are great parents.