On Tuesday morning, June 5th, I woke up at 6 am
feeling some cramping. I didn’t think much of it, but I figured I would begin
timing them, just for fun. I laid in bed and watched a couple episodes of The
Office. For an hour, I was having consistent cramping feelings about every 8
minutes. That morning, I had an appointment at the hospital to have the baby
monitored (because she was late, I had to go every 3 days after my due date) at
9:15 am. Tim took the morning off to take me. On the way to the hospital, I
called my mom (who was a 6.5 hour drive away) to let her know what was going on
because I didn’t want her to go to work if I was indeed in labor. She told me
she thought this was the real thing, but I was in denial and didn’t want her to
leave to come down at that point in case the contractions stopped and it wasn’t
really labor. I told her I would call her later and let her know how things
were progressing before she made any decisions about calling out of work. When
we arrived, I informed the nurse that it was possible that I was in early labor
because of my consistent cramps. She looked at the monitor to which I was
hooked and said that they weren’t showing up on her screen and that they were
probably insignificant and would most likely stop and start many times before
labor was really here. The monitoring
went well; her heart rate was fine and my fluid levels were fine. The
ultrasound technician was training someone, and didn’t talk to us at all, which
I thought was kind of rude, and didn’t explain anything to us, but other than
that, everything was good. So we went home.
Tim was planning to go to work after the appointment. We
were planning on taking separate cars to the hospital so he could leave directly
from there, but since I was having possible contractions, we just drove
together, which was a good thing. When we got home, I told him I didn’t want
him to go to work for a full day. He said he would go in for just an hour or
two to finish up a drawing he had due. We got home around 10:30. I got in bed
and the cramping got worse and painful. I pulled up a contraction timer on a
website and began timing the length and spacing between the contractions. Tim was ready to leave for work around 11:30 and said he would probably be
back by 1:30. We were both still in denial that I was actually in labor, so I almost let him go. At the last minute, however, I told him I was too scared to be alone to deal with the contractions
by myself, especially if it was the real thing, and he called work and decided to stay home (thankfully). If he did
go in to work, I would have been relegated to having my downstairs neighbors drive me to
the hospital.
Around 12 pm, I was having contractions that were about 4:30
minutes apart for about 50 seconds in duration.
Tim encouraged me to get up and walk, which we learned in our Bradley
Method childbirth classes was good for opening the pelvis and quickening labor,
and I walked around the house between a contraction, but once the contraction
hit, I had to sit on the couch. I
endured the next few contractions in a sitting position on our blue couch in
the living room and they were extremely painful. I asked Tim if he thought we
should call our doula—Sinai hospital has a volunteer doula program that pairs
mothers-to-be with doulas who are looking for certification and need to assist
in a certain number of births—and he agreed. I called her up and explained that
my contractions were 4 minutes apart, but that I wasn’t sure this was the real
thing because they hadn’t showed up on the monitors earlier at my appointment.
I then had to hand Tim the phone because I couldn’t talk during the
contraction. She told me I should call my doctor and see what they said I
should do.
Because I was in too much pain, Tim called the doctor’s
office, but they told him that he had to call the hospital instead and ask for
the OB on call. This was strange because I had specifically asked them at my
last appointment if I should call their office when labor started or the
hospital, and they told me to call them. Tim called the hospital and asked for
the OB on call, and she was paged. A few minutes later, we got a call back and
I answered it. The doctor asked me why I had called her instead of the doctor’s
office, and I told her I tried calling the doctor’s office but they told me to
call her at the hospital. I proceeded to
tell her that I was having contractions 4 minutes apart and they were becoming
very painful, but that I was in the hospital earlier to be monitored and they
didn’t suspect early labor. She didn’t sound very impressed and simply said I
should probably come in to at least get checked. After I hung up, we got a call
back from the hospital. It was a receptionist saying that the doctor I had just
spoken to had told her to call me and tell me to next time call the doctor’s
office and not the hospital. At this point, I was frustrated that people cared
so much about the etiquette of calling when I was in severe pain. And besides,
I did follow the rules. The doctor’s office must have misinformed Tim when they
told him to call the hospital .
Anyway, I really didn’t want to go the hospital because I
wasn’t sure it was really labor. I was
also in denial because the pain was so intense, that if it wasn’t real labor, I
wasn’t sure I could handle the pain of real labor without some sort of pain
management intervention like an epidural. We decided to go, though. We called
my mom on the way there, and I had to put the phone down during a contraction
because it was too painful to talk. I told her we were going to get checked but
not to call out of work yet because I wasn’t sure yet. She was sure the baby
was coming soon, but I wasn’t ready to acknowledge this fact yet.
to be continued...
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