Yup, still pregnant. And still in the hospital. I have been officially transferred from Labor and Delivery to the Antepartum Unit. This is a good thing, it means they are no longer worried that I will deliver any minute, but I still need some help to keep labor from proceeding. I’m still dilating – about a half cm every day or two. So it’s slow, but it hasn’t come to a stop. The good news is that I’ve made it into the 34th week which drastically ups baby’s viability, and we also got the steroids in so her lungs have a better chance of functioning on their own if she just can’t wait till term.
It’s really just a waiting game. There is a chance that they will send me home tomorrow – that depends on how far the dilation has progressed. They’ll check again in the morning. Part of me is excited at the prospect of going home to wait out the rest of my pregnancy, and part of me is terrified. I like knowing that the experts are just a button push away.
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.
I ran away to the mall a couple days ago. Everything was coming at me from every direction and I was in need of some retail therapy. Problem is, I have neither time nor money at the moment. Then I somehow silenced the nagging “you don’t have time for this…” long enough to find myself at a part of the mall populated by baby stores.
I’ve been trying very hard to avoid spending my money on baby stuff. I know the time will come when I have no choice, but now is not the time. We’re moving and we’re broke. If I’m going to spend any money I need to spend it on things we really need, like a stroller or diapers or one of those blue bulb thingies you shove up the baby’s nose to get the snot out.
This is not the kind of thing I need to be spending my money on:
I don’t believe I’ve mentioned this before, but I collect teapots – but a $79 teapot lamp… It took my breath away. I stopped to take a picture of it in the store and I don’t do that. I just sat there and looked at it for quite a while. It’s so impractical. But I love it.
Finally I tore myself away and poked around a little longer until I found the one thing that there was no way I would be able to leave the store without.
In exactly three months you are scheduled to make your grand entrance into this world, although the actual timing of that event is more up to you than any doctor’s calculations. I’m scared and excited all at the same time. I can’t wait to meet you, to hold you, to see you snuggled in your father’s arms.
Last night we went to our first childbirth class and watched a video of a woman going through labor and giving birth. I cried. I don’t think that was the intent of the movie, but it moved me. Somebody once said that parenting is deciding to allow your heart to walk around outside of your body. That’s probably the closest to how I felt watching that movie. Like it would be my heart, right there in my arms; tangible and real and fragile.
There is so much that I hope for you. I hope you will learn to think for yourself rather than just parroting the views and opinions others. I hope you will understand and value the difference between fact and opinion. I hope you will learn to process information and to see through the hype and sensationalism that is so prevalent in our world. I hope you will understand the love trumps hate, no matter what, even if the haters claim to be representing God. I hope you will learn that you are responsible for your own happiness and that you can’t just sit around feeling sorry for yourself and waiting for happiness to land on your doorstep. You have to get out there. You have to make friends and go to them rather than waiting for them to magically materialize. I hope you realize that feeling sorry for yourself only makes you feel more sorry for yourself. I hope you learn to value people for their differences rather than trying to change them to be more like you. I hope you learn to value yourself, and at a much younger age than I did. I’m still learning that lesson. I hope you learn the difference between having an understanding of where you stand with others, and worrying about what they think of you. Don’t worry about what they think of you.
Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don’t matter and those that matter don’t mind.
That quote came from Dr. Seuss, an author with whom you will become very familiar. It’s a short quote with a very big idea. One that I still have trouble dealing with because the truth is, sometimes the people that matter do mind. Sometimes the people who mind are are people you love, and it hurts when they love you for who they want you to be instead of loving you for who you are. I’m going to make a promise right now. I’m going to love you for who you are, whoever that turns out to be.
My blog reading the past couple of days has covered a seemingly endless list of New Years Resolutions, many asking about my resolutions for this year. Ha! Resolutions. This year I will be happy if I manage to safely get this baby from inside my belly to outside my belly and then appropriately feed and bathe and keep her safe for the duration of the year while at the same time not failing my classes and continuing to do the necessary work to keep a roof over our heads and our bills paid while not going insane from all the other demands on my emotional reserves, time, and energy. I think committing to anything more is a bit much.
Our last doctor appointment was a couple weeks ago. You may have heard about the freakish weather here in Seattle. Well on the day of the appointment the roads were a sheet of ice. We live 5 blocks from the office and that walk was slow and occasionally frightening because the sidewalks were just as slippery as the roads. Just putting one foot in front of the other was a challenge in grace and balance – both of which are a little short on reserves thanks to my displaced center of gravity and loosened joints (we won’t mention the general clumsiness that exists even when I’m not pregnant). Everyone keeps telling me “don’t fall down.” Uh, ya think?
The doctors appointment went well, but I had to do the glucose challenge to see if I have gestational diabetes. Gak! That is some nasty stuff you have to drink. I was an extremely high risk for that condition but, as it turns out, I don’t have gestational diabetes which is an immense relief to me. After giving up wine and unpasteurized cheeses and all the other goodies you have to give up for pregnancy, and then losing anything with any appreciable amount of fat because of the gall bladder issue, if they took away my carbs too I’d go nuts. I’m about at the end of my rope stress wise anyways – After that diagnosis you would have found me rocking under the table clinging desperately to my remaining allowed foods of celery and water while pulling my hair out.
Meanwhile, my doctor tells me I need to gain more weight.
Baby is doing very well and extremely active. She knows exactly where my bladder is, it’s her favorite spot for clog dancing. She also knows how to kick me in just the right way to make me sit straight up in bed. I’m starting to feel like a puppet. She’s not even born yet and already pulling my strings.
We live in on campus in the married housing section. Someone whose probably never had kids came up with the brilliant idea that pregnant students living in married housing must move to family housing in the third trimester. So we have to move. What day do we move? We’ll find out when it happens. We’re on a waiting list, so sometime between January 8, which is the date the school has determined that I will be in the third trimester, and April 8 when the baby is due, we will move 3 miles down the road to our new apartment. We just sit and wait for the school to assign the new apartment and give the go ahead to move. We’re in the middle of trying to get things packed up, but because we don’t know if it’s going to be a week or three months before we move, it’s hard to know what to pack. We’re packing the dishes and eating off paper plates (how very ungreen) and packing all the books that are not reference or school related, and packing my pre-pregnancy clothes, but there is still so much crap that we use every single day…
I can’t believe school starts on Monday. This break has flown by and there’s a part of me waving at the sky saying “Wait! I was supposed to get a chance to relax!” But off it goes as if I had no say whatsoever in the passage of time. In a way I’m relieved because school makes it easier to establish a routine, and routines make it easier to get things done. Also people respect your time more when school is in session. The scary thing is that the quarter ends 2 weeks before baby is due. I hope baby waits till after finals to make her grand entrance.
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