After that, all there was to do was get Trevor’s room
together… that and wait on him to get here. I had started my 2 week rotation
appointments at my OBGYN’s office… those were fun (please read the previous
with as much sarcasm as possible). But no matter how much I disliked the
visits, they were informative. I was dilated to 1cm for about 3 weeks before my
due date… with no change until the appointment on my due date – September 9th
– where I was dilated to 3cm and fully effaced. At that point, my OB decided it
would be best to strip my membranes to try to stimulate labor. She told me if I
was going to go into labor on my own, it would be within the next 24 hours. She
scheduled me to be induced on September 16th at 9am… just in case.
Brian had me walking every single day trying to get me to go into labor.
Sometimes it was just down to the end of the driveway and back and other times
he had me walking down the road a bit. He even took me to the mall once and had
me walk from Sears to the other end and back.
Then, the evening of September 11, I started having light
cramping (hours apart). It had been well over the 24 hour timeframe the doctor
had given for going into labor on my own so I figured it was something I had
eaten. I told Brian about them and he wanted me to try to time them, but they
were too light and too sporadic and I couldn’t tell where they started.
By the following morning, they were more noticeable but they
were still about an hour apart. I was still working, so I wasn’t able to focus
a lot on when they started… I was only able to tell when they reached their “peak”
and it took my attention away from whatever I was doing. Around noon, the ”cramps”
were finally somewhat timeable and were
anywhere from 8 minutes to 15 minutes apart and I decided it was time to stop
working and focus on whether this was real labor or not. Timothy had a baseball
game that night and Brian and I decided that it would be best to have an
alternative plan in place for him to get there in case we had to take off to
the hospital.
My mother in law, who had been on standby for weeks, came
over at 5:30 to pick up Timothy and Thomas and head to the game. I think Trevor
must have been waiting on the boys to be taken care of because my water broke
at 5:40ish. (DISCLAIMER:
Gross descriptive things coming.) It wasn’t the big “gush” that you see in the
movies or read about in books so I wasn’t sure it was that. I had used the
toilet in the master bathroom and walked to the kitchen when Trevor kicked and
it felt like I had peed myself. (This had happened a couple times before so I
wasn’t concerned. I did think it was odd because I had JUST emptied my bladder,
but I figured I just hadn’t bent over enough to get it all out.) I headed back
to the bathroom, cleaned myself up, tried to pee again (nothing came out), put
on some new underwear, and headed back to the living room to say bye to the
boys. I wasn’t able to make it through the living room before it happened
again. So back to the bathroom I went
and repeated the process, only this time I put on a pad in case it happened
again… at the rate I was going, I was going to run out of clean underwear and soon!
Brian and I decided it was time to get our hospital bags in
the car and head to town. The boys headed to the baseball game with their
grandma and we headed in the other direction to the hospital. Calls were made
to the doctor’s office and the hospital on the way there but I decided not to
call any family at that time in case it was a false alarm. The way I saw it, I
already had enough to deal with and didn’t want/ need to add to that by having
people other than hospital staff hovering. (I apologize if anyone is offended
by that, but that ended up being a really good decision. You’ll see in a
minute.)
We got to the hospital at almost 6pm on the dot. It was a
good thing we called ahead because there was ONE exam room open. This room was
about the size of our master bathroom, closets included. There was enough room
in there for Brian and myself, but it got very tight in there once the doctor
and nurse came in together. (Speaking of the doctor… Lisa Delong was the one
from my doctor’s office that was on call. I had seen her ONCE before… she was
the only one there (out of 5) that I hadn’t quite formed an opinion on yet. I
had seen the others multiple times.) It was confirmed that I was in labor, but
they told me that they were unusually busy that evening and all of the birthing
suites were occupied at that time and I would need to wait until someone had
their baby and was moved to their mommy/ baby suite. (You stay in the birthing
suite for 2 hours after giving birth to let the effects of anesthesia wear off
some. The baby normally gets their first feeding in this room also.) Once all
of the admission stuff was taken care of, we decided to call family and let
them know what was going on.
...... to be continued. The rest of the birth next!
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