False Labor and Hospital Woes

After the infernal never ending contractions went to 5 minutes apart, 70 seconds long, and stayed that way for approximately five hours, I called it and went to L&D.  They weren’t getting any more intense, which I knew was not a great sign, but they also were not going away  I was awakened at 12:30 or so by some bad ones, timed them for ages, took a hot shower (didn’t stop it), drank gallons of water (didn’t stop it), paced the house (didn’t stop it), then woke the Professor at 3:30.  We held on til 5:30 just to make sure we weren’t waking everybody up and deploying the troops for no reason, but they continued – still at the same level of intensity, which I’d put at about a 3 on a 1-10 scale.  I called our nighttime labor contingency person, who drove over to stay with the boys til they woke up, and the Professor and I headed in.

We came in through the ER and they wheeled me up and promptly strapped me into a fetal monitor for three hours, before eventually getting around to checking me and discovering that I did not have a “laboring cervix.”  This is the part where I miss my midwives.  See, the midwife would have checked first thing.  They find a woman’s subjective experience and the signs of her body sufficient evidence of what is happening to her, for the most part, and do not rely totally on machines to tell them what is going on.  The hospital wanted a length of tape from the machine that showed the baby was ok and told them my uterine activity in a series of spikes on a graph.  But I could have told them the baby was ok because he was beating me to death with his little legs and arms, and anyway a few minutes on the doppler would have been sufficient to check his heart.  And I was telling them when my contractions stopped and started, if anyone would hear me.  Sigh.  I mean, ultimately not a huge deal, but I ended up at the hospital laying perfectly still on a bed for hours longer than I might otherwise have been if they’d just asked me a few questions, checked dilation, and let us go.

Now imagine if I was having a home birth!  The midwife would have come to my house, checked it out, maybe said some soothing words and rubbed my back a bit and left – we’d have disturbed one person for an hour, instead of having to call on the troops to watch our kids, call our parents and get them driving because we knew it’d be hours before we knew one way or another, and I’d have been spared the stress and exhaustion of going into a hospital, registering, getting undressed and strapped to machines . . . where I wasn’t permitted to eat anything even though I hadn’t eaten in over 14 hours and it was kind of obvious that things weren’t progressing.  I don’t so much mind the trip in, but once you’re there you’re sort of trapped in a bureaucracy and handled according to protocols and lists of Best Practices.  Nobody really listens to you much, at least not until they’ve done all the paperwork.  It’s like a machine, and you have to be the cog that fits.  There were only one or two other laboring women there, and I heard the nurse telling the Professor in the hall that this was because it’s Sunday and of course nobody schedules an induction or C section for a Sunday.  Made me curious how many women go into spontaneous labor anymore.

Well, so that’s that.  I went home, I’ve been home, I’m working from home.  Having contractions right now, in fact.  I told the nurse I wasn’t sure how I’d know it was really starting, given the jumpy contracting state of my womb at the moment, and she launched into a somewhat condescending description of the difference between amniotic fluid and pee.  I was like – look, lady, my first kid was born about an hour and a half after my water broke during active labor, and my second kid was born with the bag of waters intact, so if I’d waited til the water broke with them then I’d have been in trouble.  I know what pee smells like, I know what active labor feels like and I also know that once I’m in active labor, the kid comes out within the hour . . . and the hospital is half an hour away  . . . and she just said “Well drink lots of water and take a Tylenol.”  I suppose there is no answer to my question, but just tell me that.  “I don’t know girl, you come in when it feels right and we’ll check you any time” would have felt more supportive.

I guess nobody can get anything right with me right now, anyway, I’m so grumpy.  I wish he’d just come.  It’s a bit early, of course – 37.5 weeks – but he’d be totally fine and then I could stop with this infernal cramping, officially start my maternity leave, and get on with it.

And also, meet him.  I was so excited to meet him, you know?  Of everything, that was the biggest disappointment of leaving that hospital without a baby.  I wanted to see him and hold him and figure out his name, and instead I walked out with him continuing to assault me from the inside, like my belly is a bag full of angry cats.  He doesn’t like these contractions either, and is fighting them.  A little boxer.

One day this will all be a memory.  Which day?  My sister’s placing bets on Wednesday.  I have this terrible fear that he’ll linger in there til Valentine’s Day.  Anything is possible.  We’ll just have to wait and see.