Bed Rest

So I woke up feeling envious of my husband who was going out of town for the day for a business meeting. I've been told not to do any traveling for a while now and its been hard not being able to go anywhere fun this summer. It was Gene's last trip out of town and since my fetal fibronectin came back negative on Monday and Gene was only going to be gone during the day, I didn't feel too uneasy about it.

I did not go to work yesterday for the new four hour shift because it was a light surgery schedule and they offered me the day off since I had so much activity with my NST the day before. The extent of my activities included a hair cut, grabbing a quick lunch and getting about 5 items at the grocery store- certainly not over exerting myself by any means. I came home and took a nap which usually helps my contractions slow down or go away for a while. Except this time, when I woke up I had 6 contractions in a 20 minute period all spaced at regular intervals. I called L&D triage and they said I could try drinking another glass of water (I was up to 7 glasses already that day) and see if that helped, but that they would definitely want to have me come in if they didn't slow down. I continued to have two more contractions still spaced equally apart, so I headed out the door trying unsuccessfully not to cry. I let Gene know what was going on and he was trying to catch an earlier flight home. I was praying that I wouldn't have to go through Andrew deciding to come without Gene being here. Gene has this great way of calming me down and making me feel like everything will be okay- it's one of the many great reasons why I love this man I married. We are very good for each other.

Gene was able to make it into L&D for about the last half of my 9 hour stay. They tried giving me i.v. fluids which didn't help at all. My cervix had not changed since Monday's exam, but the contractions were still continuing to come every 3-4 minutes. The next step was two separate doses of nicardipine. This is a medication that helps the uterus relax by blocking the calcium that is required for the contraction of the uterine muscle. They still couldn't get things to slow down right away, so they gave me a shot of steroids in case Andrew should decide to make his grand entrance in the next week or two. We ended up staying there until about 2am before they saw a seven minute break between contractions. They rechecked my cervix which was unchanged and sent me home with a prescription for nicardipine and instructions to come back to L&D tonight to get a second and final shot of steroids. Needless to say, working is out of the question now. The good news is that I have had very few contractions today, so maybe the nicardipine is doing it's job! Andrew handled all of this with flying colors. In fact, he was so active with good heart rate variablility that they ended up monitoring only my contractions for the rest of the stay.

So my journey of modified bed rest begins! Can I just say how much I love Netflix and their instant download section, not to mention the local library. If anyone has any great books they have read lately, please let me know the titles so we can get them at the library. Hopefully, we can stretch this out for another 5 1/2 weeks until our induction day! Charlie and Lucy are going to love having someone home during the day, be we worry how they'll adjust when Andrew is born and we are hardly ever home for a while. Thankfully, we have good neighbors that have offered to take them to play with their best friends down the street when that time comes.

Hope everyone is enjoying their weekend and doing something fun! Will post if anything changes!