Sunday, October 7th (41
+3)
I woke up at 3 AM to contractions.
These were stronger than they previously had been and were now 12-15
min apart and about 45 seconds long. I did my best to fall asleep
between them, but the ones I would have when laying down would hit me
really hard and I couldn't move fast enough to find a more
comfortable position before they were over. I woke up as they were
peaking, so I wasn't able to fully be in control of them. They felt
sort of like someone was digging their knuckles into my pelvic bone
just in front of my hips on both sides. They hurt. They were the only
part of this whole thing that really did.
At 3:30, I got up to go to the bathroom
and saw more mucous (yay!), and at 5:15 there was a large amount of
mucous streaked with blood (more yay!). At 7:40 I'm pretty sure I
lost the rest of my plug.
I checked in with Christine just before
9 AM and told her what had been happening. She encouraged me to nap
if I could, but to get up if that wasn't possible (since laying down
hurt and made me want to cry). I also texted with Nichole. She
encouraged me to rest, in her usual fashion, and to stop thinking so
much and just let things happen. I told her I would be great if I
could just take a nap standing up, since laying down was what was so
uncomfortable. She said she had lots of tricks, but that was not one
of them. Bummer.
I got up at 9:45 and ate breakfast, and
the contractions slowed enough that I could fall asleep. I took a
short nap and woke up at 11:30. Everything seemed to have stopped.
I was so tired and frustrated at this
point. I felt like something must really be wrong with me. Or if it
wasn't me, it was the baby. I had been doing my best to Belly Map
over the last few months, but it had recently gotten to where I could
only tell where his butt was. I wasn't really sure which way he was
facing, and my only clue was where I could hear his heartbeat with my
fetoscope. Was his head cockeyed? Did he have a nuchal hand? What was
going on?!?! He had been buried deep in my pelvis for over 3 weeks
now, so deep that at one visit with Kay (the second midwife in the
practice) she had told me all she could feel was a shoulder, but that
she assumed there was a head on top of it! He was down in there and
wasn't budging.
Christine checked in with me before her
brunch, and offered to come sift me with her Rebozo later in the
afternoon. I was definitely up for that! Anything that might help fix
whatever was wrong sounded like a good plan to me!
She arrived around 3 PM, sifted me, and
then had me do these huge open-leg crawls on my hands and knees
around my bedroom. I'm really glad things like this are not recorded
on video because I am SURE I looked utterly ridiculous. But in the
moment, I didn't care. I just wanted it to work! Please, please work!
Joel had gone out to replace our
defective router earlier in the day and it was FINALLY fixed around 5
PM! This may seem like a weird detail to have in a birth story, but
when your distraction techniques consist of watching Netflix on your
Roku and chatting online, you kind of NEED your internet. So when it
came back, I was VERY happy!
Christine and I went back to chatting
and I mentioned to her that I thought the sifting might have done
something because I was feeling achy and having some pressure, and
there had been a few more contractions. Yay! Come on slow and steady!
I really never totally stopped having contractions, I just got really
good at ignoring most of them and they spaced out so far that they
weren't worth recording. But if I look back at my logs, there's at
least one every hour where I wanted to see how long they were so I
recorded one.
Christine invited me over to go power
walking, which sounded good to me. Joel and I decided he would drop
me off at her house and then take the kids to dinner with friends of
ours while Christine and I walked. I got to her house a little after
6 PM and we walked her neighborhood for 40 min and talked. I didn't
have any noticeable contractions during the walk, but that could have
been because I got so good at ignoring the minor ones. I had had one
on the way to Christine's house, so I knew they were still happening.
The next one I noticed was at 7 PM. I was standing in Christine's
dining room and it came on. It was enough that I had to shift my
weight around during it because standing still was uncomfortable. I
didn't tell her about it, since I figured it was just a result of the
walking and didn't mean anything.
Joel picked me up and we came home. He
put the kids to bed while I ate dinner, and then I resumed my post at
the computer.....sitting and chatting, and just waiting for things
to happen. I had had 2 more noticeable contractions on the way home
from Christine's house (about a 20 min drive) and they hadn't
stopped, so I assumed they had picked up in frequency. I started
timing timing them again at 8:25 PM to see what was going on, and
they were 7-10 minutes apart and 30-60 seconds long. Christine teased
me about spending too much time focusing on my contraction timer and
told me to put the phone down. I promised her I had only timed a few
at the request of Nichole (who I was also chatting with) because she
wanted to know the frequency and I didn't know. I did promise her I
had only timed four, and then I put the phone down.
I had been sitting perched on the edge
of my recliner, but by then had to get up because it was no longer
comfortable to sit through them. I helped Joel disassemble the chair
so it could be moved out of our room (to make more space for the
birth pool) and sat on my birth ball next to my bed with the laptop.
Christine suggested I try some wine and a bath to see what would
happen. I poured my wine and got in the tub at 9:15. The contractions
slowed, but I still had two while I was in there. I brought my phone
with me so I could keep chatting (as a distraction).
I stayed in the tub about 25 minutes
and then decided to get out. I had taken a shower earlier in the day
and washed my hair, and I really wanted it to be flat ironed so it
would look good for the birth pictures. Since it was getting late,
and things were sort of picking up, I decided I couldn't put off
doing my hair any longer. Apparently I wasn't the only one who
thought things might be progressing, Nichole also stepped away to go
wash her hair and Christine was headed that way, too!
I turned my flat iron on and put on
Clueless on Netflix. I needed
some mindless distraction while everyone was away. It took me FOREVER
to do my hair. I would get up off my ball, walk the 10 feet to the
bathroom, get one section of my hair ironed and then have to hurry
back to sit on my ball for a contraction. It was a horrible cycle. I
think it ended up taking me about 90 minutes to do my hair! While I
was having the contractions, I would chat with Christine. I
contemplated moving my birth ball into the bathroom, but I wouldn't
have been able to see the mirror so it wouldn't have helped a whole
lot anyway.
During all this, I
was also chatting with Ashley, again. We confirmed plans for her to
come watch my kids the next afternoon, and then segued into me giving
her lactation advice. After that we moved on to looking at her
brother-in-law's wedding pictures, and then each others'. It was a
good distraction.
In the meantime,
Christine and I were chatting about our curly hair and why it was
taking me so long to fix mine, and around 11 PM she had me time a few
more contractions. Between 10 and 11 PM they were about 5-1/2 to 7
min apart and lasting 30-60 seconds. She decided she would stay up
with me for a little while longer and see what happened. Just before
midnight, Christine said Nichole was telling her to go bed since
things were staying about the same. I agreed and said I was going to
try to lay down as well. I was still terrified of being horizontal
because those contractions were so much more intense and they still
felt like someone was digging into my bones. I couldn't really sleep
through them either, so it felt kind of pointless to tease myself by
trying.
No comments:
Post a Comment