Labor & Delivery Visit #1

First, everything is okay. But last night around 8:30 I started having some really intense cramping in my lower uterus and my lower back. Like the good little pregnant person I am I knew that the first thing any doctor will tell you is to drink water and lay on your side to see if they get better. So that's what I did for two hours, and it still wasn't better. At 10:30 I decided to try a bath to see if that would help and that too was a no go.

Then I decided I should just try to sleep but because of the pain this also wasn't working and at this point Marcus was worried and wanted me to call a doctor. So at 11:00 I called urgent care, and the on call doctor called me back around 11:30 and asked me all the standard questions. Duration, frequency, pain rate, any other problems with this pregnancy (I mentioned the short cervix and the negative fFN test from a few weeks ago etc.) After all of this he decides that I should probably come into the hospital and be hooked up to some machines to see if everything is okay.

Great. First, I had no idea where the L&D part of the hospital is. The hospital here is huge and it seems like it's all over the city. Oddly enough when I gave Marcus the name of the streets and the entrance we needed to use he knew exactly where it was apparently he's much more observant of our surroundings than I am. The second issue is parking. The valet parking wasn't in use since it was after midnight on a weekend and parking downtown is a nightmare anyways. I told Marcus that in the coming months we're probably going to need to re-evaluate the parking situation. There must be somewhere to park that we were missing. We parked probably illegally in some random hospital round about thing.

Some lady in a suit basically met us at the door and already had a bracelet printed out for me and she took us up to the L&D floor. Once there they just had me get into a bed and hooked up monitors to check the babies and to see if I was contracting or not. So I laid there for about an hour with all of that on. Then they did another fFN test and checked my cervix which has shortened just a little bit again. Last check it was between 2.1 and 2.4 it's now between 2.1 and 2.2. Then they did a quick ultrasound of the babies and we learned that our boy had completely switched positions. For the last few weeks he's been head down right next to my cervix, and he is now completely breach and he and his sister are both head up with their feet and knees on my bladder (which explains the added kicks I've been feeling).

After a few hours of monitoring they told me I could go and the doctor would get back to me with the results of the fFN test and things sometime in the morning. Marcus was freaking out, poor guy. I honestly felt like all of this was a little unnecessary and I felt a little stupid for even going in, but I suppose it's better to be safe than sorry and have everything checked out and I did call first and the doctor told me to come in so... I have no idea what was causing the cramping, I'm not really sure if the doctors do either but for now all is well, and I'm still just waiting on the doctor to call with the test results. I wish there was some way to know what's "normal" and what's not. I hate second guessing myself. I don't want to be a hypochondriac (and I did wait about 3 hours last night before I called) but I also don't want to ignore something that could potentially be problematic.

And now for some real hilarity I had Marcus take a picture of me with the monitors hooked up (because what else were we going to do for an hour) and I look horrible. I was exhausted and super uncomfortable since laying on my back makes it really difficult to breath and the nurse had lowered the bed too much, my arm is hanging over the bed like I'm dying or something and I'm kind of laying on the remote for the bed. We got home around 2am and now I'm trying to find some energy to study for my NT mid-term tomorrow.

So here it is my death like picture so not cute (but they did color coordinate the monitors for the babies, pink for the girl and blue for the boy). I also must confess that the nurse asked if they had names, I said yes and she wanted to know what they were and I figured she wouldn't tell anyone, her reception of them was a little odd, so now I feel even more affirmed that we will not be telling anyone else until they're here. I don't want odd reactions to our baby names because they are literally the only two names in existence that Marcus and I both agree on.