The beginning

I know lots of people don't care about birth stories, but I like them so I'm posting mine.

As I said in this post I was having contractions painful enough to wake me up starting on Saturday night (about once an hour.) They continued all day Sunday anywhere from 5 to 10 minutes apart until late in the evening when they slowed down to every 30 minutes or so. Unfortunately that meant I woke up every half hour all night Sunday night. I was tired Monday morning. I timed contractions all day Monday; they started off about 8 minutes apart and by the time I posted that evening they had been every 2 -4 minutes for several hours. By the time we left for the hospital around 8:30 pm Monday I was exhausted. Exhausted enough that I wasn't doing so well with pain management anymore. When we left I told Brian that if I wasn't at least at 5 cm I was going to get an epidural just so I could get some sleep.

We got to the hospital, got checked in, and the nurse checked me. I was at 3 cm. BOOOOO. I was also a little dehydrated so the nurse started an IV (on her first try-- that will come into play later) and put on the monitors. My doctor happened to be at the hospital in surgery so they called her and she came in as soon as the surgery was over. At this point we'd probably been there for an hour so I was not excited when my doctor checked me and I was still at 3 cm. My doctor wanted to monitor me for another hour and send me home if there was no change by then. My hope at this point was that having the IV fluids would either a) put me into active labor or b) cause my contractions to stop so I could go home and sleep.

A couple side notes here. My blood pressure was up at this point. Not high enough to worry, but definitely high for my baseline. Also, my heart rate was high. Like seriously high. I don't think I saw it drop below 94 bpm the whole time I was being monitored. The baby wasn't particularly cooperative with the monitors; he was moving a lot and our sweet nurse kept having to come in and adjust the monitors to pick up his heart rate instead of mine.

After the hour of monitoring, my doctor came back in checked me. Still at 3 cm. Which means, not active labor and they're sending me home. So 2 days worth of contractions? Just prodromal labor. Unfortunately the IV fluids haven't stopped the contractions, so I was still having contractions every few minutes as we left the hospital. That was around midnight. Not how I wanted to walk away from L&D. Once we got home I took 2 benedryl in the hopes that it would allow me to sleep through the contractions. That didn't work, but I still tried to sleep because at this point I was just deliriously tired. Finally, after 2 hours of not sleeping, my water broke. Time to go back to the hospital.