Labour day

It's been getting mighty uncomfortable for me over the last week or so. That's because one of the bubs is engaged and has all 30 cm of her/his head resting on my cervix. Because of that, there's lots of pressure, especially when I'm standing up and when she (I'm randomly allocating sex here :) ) decides to wiggle around.

So, I've been on the phone quite regularly with my doctor who's warned me to stay off my feet so that she would move a little bit and not irritate the cervix which might cause me to go into labour. At 33 weeks, even though they'll survive, they'll need special care if they come out now and I don't really want to go through the heartbreak of seeing them with tubes and machines and not be able to go back home with me.

The doctor warned me that if anything changed, I was to go to hospital. So I did, Friday morning because there was a little bit of bleeding Thursday night. I thought this was just going to be routine thing where he'd strap me up to the machine to check on the babies, do an internal and send me on the way- I did have tea plans in the afternoon.

Unfortunately, it wasn't just an hour on the machine. While on the machine, which sends out the report following report - the tight black squiggly lines are the babies heart rates; the more spaced out one below measures whether my uterus is contracting- things did not look so good.


The problem was that the little peaks that can be seen here were much more aggressive on Friday morning when they strapped the Dopplers onto me. When the doctor came in to take a look at the print out, his eyes widened and he asked if I was in any pain. I was like "nope, no pain, some twinges here and there but no pain really." I asked why and he said that from the looks of things, I was having some relatively strong contractions and pretty regular ones coming in at every 9 minutes. He kept asking if I felt anything and I kept looking very puzzled and shaking my head. Anyway, because of that, he saw fit to keep me in hospital overnight on a drip to control the contractions because we didn't want them to progress anymore and send the babies into the world prematurely.

The problem with being strapped onto the machine the entire day and having a drip stuck painfully into my arm was that I was extremely immobile. By the end of the day, my legs were numb and my back and butt hurt from lying down. I begged the nurses to let me take a walk after they took of the dopplers but they refused because of the drip. But labour ward nurses, I must say are rather sticky about rules. They wouldn't let my brother come in because he wasn't my spouse, even though I said I wasn't about to deliver, they wouldn't let me take a walk and wheel the drip around with me because I might collapse in a dead faint. Only when I got moved to a regular ward was I allowed to move around and even take a shower.

Packrat was a sweety and stayed with me through the night although I must say, he had more fun than I did. He slept like a baby in the adjoining bed but I hated the drip because it hurt my hand when I moved and I couldn't sleep properly because the sheets were plasticky, and I'd been in bed the entire day and wasn't really tired and every time I moved, my belly went all Braxton Hicks which got me worried that I was having more contractions and I desperately desperately wanted to go home and not stay in hospital a minute longer than I needed to.

Thankfully, the drip helped a great deal which resulted in the above printout with only the mini peaks which didn't mean much and I was able to go home by lunchtime. Unfortunately, the night of observation, plus drip, plus what not cost me $1200 after Medisave. That totally floored me and made me swear that the next time I was going to get warded was when the babies were actually ready to see the world. It's too expensive otherwise and too scary. For the first time, I was faced with the possibility of seeing the babies before they were ready and it was quite scary actually. And I really don't want to go through that again. Hopefully they'll be good for another 3 weeks or so.

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