That’s right, I’m in the hospital right now.  Saturday night was a tough night for me with lots of intestinal cramping and nausea.  I was up all night.  The next morning we started going through all the boxes we hadn’t unpacked yet looking for the booklet on pregnancy and childbirth from our doctor.  When we finally found the booklet and thumbed through it and noticed on the page with “Warning Signs” – I could go down the list and check off a pretty good percentage.  That warranted a call to the consulting nurse who said “Come on down.”

That led to six hours in the Labor and Delivery Triage room.  When I first got there, all of my symptoms disappeared.  Why does that happen??  It’s so frustrating to sit there with a Doctor or Nurse and try to describe symptoms you’re no longer having – In fact, most of the time in triage, I felt great but a little embarrassed because I came in with no symptoms.  They put me on a monitor to track my contractions and the baby’s heart rate.  I didn’t feel a single contraction, but as it turns out, the monitor showed that I was having pretty frequent contractions.  They checked my cervix after a few hours and I was dilated to 1 cm, 2 hours later I was dilated to 2.5 cm.  That’s when they told me they were preparing a room for me.

I honestly thought we would go in, they would check me out and then send me home with orders to call them if the cramping and nausea comes back.  Not so much.  Instead the plan is to put me on medication to slow down the contractions and steroids to beef up the baby’s lungs in case we’re not able to stop labor from proceeding.  It wasn’t really sinking in what was going on until the doctor started telling me about how my baby was most likely viable at this age, but if she was born now, she would go straight to the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit.

Since I was admitted Sunday night, the baby’s heart-rate has remained steady, and so have the contractions.  It still strikes me as extremely weird that I can’t feel the contractions.  I’m hoping that bodes well for delivery.  The baby also continues to be very active, which makes me feel good.

They are going to check me again in the morning to see if dilation has stopped or continued.  If it stopped, I get to go home with orders to stay off my feet.  If dilation has continued, I may be in here a while.

Baby seems to be active and feisty and raring to get on with life, which I think will be helpful to her if she is born with a hurdle to overcome – such as being premature.  I hope she can settle down and wait a few weeks and use that exuberance for getting on with life a little later.