The whole preterm labor thing can be very frustrating. Trying to figure out whether these contractions are intense enough or frequent enough to call the doc. Because every time I have called, they have sent me to L&D triage (“It’s better to be on the safe side.”)
Almost every night in December I had this struggle between 1 – 3 AM, not my sharpest hours of the day, and a time when I always drifted back to sleep between intense contractions and struggled with how many I’d really had that hour and whether or not they were “like clockwork,” since they would be 6 minutes apart for an hour, except for the 15 minutes when I drifted off, when they were . . . who knows how many minutes apart?
Well, since my hospital stay at the end of December, my contractions have been weaker at night and many nights I’ve even slept through them. I’m sure the procardia has helped and I’m sure bedrest doesn’t hurt either.
But last night from 12:30 -3:30 AM my contractions were rather intense and four minutes apart. I was back to all the mental wrestling: How intense are they really? And are they “like clockwork,” if that time they were only three minutes apart? And: if I go up to the hospital, are they just going to give me IVs, monitor me, say I’m still 1 cm and send me back home? Or (maybe worse) keep me in the hospital for a few days, say I’m still 1 cm and send me back home?
I never know what to do.
This morning I woke up with contractions, still rather strong (not quite as strong as the ones in the middle of the night) but strong enough and close enough, that we decided we should call the doctor.
So you know the drill . . . “we want you to go on in to Labor and Delivery triage to get checked out and stay on the monitors for a little bit. . . We’ll tell them you’re coming. . .”
[sigh] Here we go again.
At least she’s still inside, I keep reminding myself. She’s not in the NICU. This is a good thing.