Oh, the Braxton Hicks...

They say that Braxton Hicks are your uterus' way of practicing for labor. Well, if that is the case, then my uterus should be set! As I mentioned in my last post, I had been having intermittent contractions, but nothing too regular or frequent. And then a week ago last Thursday, they started getting closer and closer together. I was drinking water like it was going out of style and laying down, but they just kept coming. When they got to more than 6 in an hour, I called the oncall doctor and she said to head in to the hospital. I was 34 weeks at the time, so they want to keep you from going into labor at that point still. It was 11pm, which is not very convenient when you have a 3 year old sleeping soundly in the other room. We called my sister-in-law who is a nurse at the same hospital and she was going to be getting off in a half hour. By this time, the contractions were about 5 minutes apart, so we elected to try to get a sleeping Adan into the car and meet her there. She then would switch vehicles with us and bring him back home. That whole staying asleep thing, though? Yeah, didn't happen. I felt bad when I heard he stayed up until 1:30am - yikes!

Anyway, we got checked into what they call the labor and delivery triage unit and they hooked me up to both a contraction monitor and a doppler device to track the baby's heartbeat. The contraction monitor started recording contractions every 2-3 minutes, so they had really increased in frequency by that time. The baby's heartbeat was perfect, so no problem there.

Luckily, I was not dilated or effaced at all. After the contractions continued to maintain themselves at every 2-3 minutes, though, the doctor decided to give me a shot of terbutaline. This drug is used both to try to stop labor and apparently for asthma attacks. One of the not so fun side effects is that it makes you jittery. They gave me the shot and within 10 minutes I was feeling the jitters, and it wasn't too much longer after that that the baby started moving around like crazy and heartrate was all over the map (sometimes up to near 180 bpm). They told me the heartrate wasn't anything to be concerned about and that it will spike up like that when they are moving around, but it bothered me that it affected her so much. They told me they would monitor us for two more hours and then, providing the contractions had stopped, I could go home. Fortunately they did stop, but because of those darn jitters, I was not able to fall asleep there either. We arrived back home somewhere around 2:30 or 3am, and thankfully I was able to fall asleep then.

Since then, the contractions seem to follow a pretty regular pattern for me. In the morning, I have very few, if any. Toward afternoon I'll start having intermittent ones and by evening, I have at least 3-4 an hour. A couple of times it's gotten to that 6 in an hour point, but since they don't stay at that rate, I've been able to avoid another hospital visit.

Tomorrow is my next appointment, so I'll catch my regular doctor up to speed on how they've been since the hospital visit, of which she is aware. Her nurse called me the next day and just told me to continue to increase the fluids and take it easy for now, which is what I was already doing on my own.

I've done a bit of googling to see if this means I'll likely deliver ahead of my delivery date, but it seems like that is not necessarily the case. Some people have them quite frequently for several weeks before delivery, so who knows, I could still be pregnant on July 24th when the doctor said she'll go ahead and induce!

The night we went to the hospital, Adan of course what we were doing riding in the car in the middle of the night. I told him mommy's stomach was hurting so we were just going to have the doctor check it out, but that everything was okay. He accepted that and didn't seem concerned. The next night, the baby kicked in such a way that really hurt and took me by surprise, so I kind of grunted. Adan comes over and says, 'Mommy, what's wrong?' So I told him that the baby had kicked and it hurt. He said very seriously, 'We better call the doctor'. I explained to him that we didn't need to call the doctor for that, but I just think it's so darn sweet how he wants to take care of me. He's going to be such a good big brother! I'll post in a couple of days about the Big Brother/Big Sister class we took with him last weekend. It was so much fun!