Scary Night

I'll skip to the chase and start with the ending: everything turned out ok. Now you can breathe much easier as you read about our eventful evening that we certainly hope does not repeat itself until after at least 37 weeks gestation.

Wednesday was an ordinary enough day. I was busy working, but didn't think I had overdone anything. I drove down for Isabelle's parent/teacher conference and had a very good chat with her teacher. Towards the end of the conference, my belly started tightening and you could see it on my face. She did not yet know we were expecting, and so I told her what was going on. I had felt a few Braxton-Hicks contractions within the past week or so, and didn't think much of it..... at first. I continued to have them however, and it was very frequent. Being that I'm only 14 weeks along, I was starting to worry. Shawn was not able to make the conference and attended by speaker phone. He was picking up Isabelle, and we met about 10 minutes away from the school. By this time, I had been feeling this tightening for about 20 minutes, and they were sometimes closer than a minute apart, but never more than 2 minutes apart. I started to panic, as most pregnant women would at this point, and as I was driving to meet Shawn, my mind raced to worst-case-scenario: That I would need to be transported to the hospital (which is about 20-30 minutes away from Izi's school) by ambulance. I kid you not, there was an ambulance in the parking lot of the park-and-ride where we met. Which of course, only confirmed my worst fears. I had Shawn call his mom for my doctor's number, which was on our fridge. I ended up calling the answering service twice because the on-call doctor did not return my call which is highly unusual for my doctor's office. In the meantime, we drove down to the hospital because by this time, I was still experiencing the contractions at very close intervals and it had now been over an hour. By the time they stopped, they had continued for 2 solid hours. They checked everything over to be sure there wasn't any type of infection and it all came back negative. I already had a regular doctor's appointment scheduled for the next day, which made me feel a whole lot better.

Now for the only comical moment of the evening: The doctor in triage asked about constipation because that can simulate contractions. As that was not an issue, she went on to tell us she was the "Poop Nazi" and didn't think enough people paid attention to colon health. We both about lost it at that moment, and are still making jokes about the "Poop Nazi." The other possibility was dehydration and over-exerting myself. I'm leaning more towards that explanation, but my regular doctor is still going to do a cervical ultrasound to be sure of no other problems.

The following night, I did start to feeling the contractions again, but I had a drink and laid down and let Shawn handle the rest of bedtime. Since then, no tightening so I'm just trying to take it easy and drink plenty of fluids.