Labor and Delivery

By Wednesday night, June 13th,  I felt like I was having about 1 contraction an hour (after my apt. though, I knew for every 1 I was feeling I was probably having a few that I wasn't), but I was also starting to have cramps too and just didn't feel right. I called my doctor Thursday morning to let them now and to see if my UTI test results were in. I was actually sort of hoping it would come back positive because it would explain most of my symptoms. The nurse told me to stay in bed and drink lots of water until she called back. That was already my plan (I had already been in bed since Tuesday). She called back in the afternoon and told me that the UTI test had come back negative and that Dr. Nelson wanted me to go to Labor and Delivery just to be safe. 

I called Nic and he came home from work to get me. We drove down to Huntington Memorial Hospital even though it isn't our normal hospital because they have a NICU and checked in. I really was hoping I was going to be embarrassed from over-reacting, be told I'm fine and sent home. They hooked me up to a monitor that recorded all my contractions. At first I was having small ones that they explained were the cramps I was feeling. They said that kind of recording is usually indicative of a UTI, but we already knew I didn't have that so they kept monitoring me. A short while later they came in and said that the machine was now picking up much more significant contractions and at a pretty high frequency so they wanted to keep monitoring me. While we were there I drank an enormous cup of water (that was after the 10 or so cups I had already had that day) so they also couldn't blame the contractions on dehydration. They informed me I was having contractions about 2-3 minutes apart! It was pretty scary to hear that because I only felt a couple of them the entire time they were monitoring me. They ended up giving me a shot of Trebuterol to stop the contractions. It made me really shaky and a bit anxious. Apparently it stopped the contractions, but they still wanted to monitor me. They also did the FFN test on me to see what the likelihood was that I would go into labor in the next two weeks. They came back about 30 minutes later and said that once the shot wore off the contractions picked right up again. Then we had to hang out and wait for the FFN results. The results were thankfully negative, which meant that it was very unlikely that I would go into labor in the next 2 weeks, which was great news, but considering I was only 30 weeks, the fact that I was having contractions so consistently at all was very scary!! They also checked my cervix and told me that I wasn't dilated so that was more good news. After speaking with my doctor, they sent me home with a prescription for Procardia (to be taken every 8 hours to minimize the contractions) and instructions to be on strict bed rest with bathroom privileges only. They even forced me to be wheeled out in a wheelchair! I was obviously happy to be going home, but pretty freaked out that all this was happening at 30 weeks! I went from feeling completely overwhelmed about how on earth I was going to get everything ready in 10 weeks to worrying about how I was going to keep my little guy in as long as possible while getting the essentials ready ASAP because he could now be arriving way sooner than we'd hoped!