Saturday, July 20, 2013

Entering "Expectant Management" Phase

Well, today I am 34w2d!  It has been a VERY long day, and it even seems like now that it's both a blur, and a bunch of crazy days all wrapped up together.  This is an EXTREMELY nerve wracking phase, and one that is wreaking some serious havoc on my emotional state.

In my head, I replay all of the changes in my thoughts that have gone down in the past few days.  The week started with becoming more nervous at the increase in contractions that I was experiencing.  The nervousness turned to a bit of anger before/during/after my weekly doctor's appointment.  I kept debating with myself whether I should have trumped the doctor and gone to OB triage on Wednesday.  I had that same feeling on Thursday, but drove myself into an emotional tizzy because I was home alone then...and I was really having a hard time convincing myself that contractions were bad enough to warrant a visit to triage.  Friday morning was a more of a relief, because I expected that all of my worries would be monitored in a good place.  Relief turned to a little bit of shock (not expecting things to have escalated as far as they had).  Shock turned to relief again when the suggestion came down that they might be able to manage things with terbutaline.

At that point, my thought had to quickly shift between "great, we're going to hold this off again for the time being!" to "this is really happening, we're going to have a baby tonight!".  There's a lot of mental preparation that needs to go into both scenarios...the expectation that they can stop labor (and you can relax after they do), or the expectation that you're going into this full throttle, and you'll have a new baby soon.  Both of those were as fickle as the wind.

In any case, the run down of things right now is that I'm in the antepartum unit (AGAIN...I had one of the same nurses I had last time...funny).  I have no idea in the world if my cervix has changed (which is apparently the thing that was holding me back from delivering...funny).  Apparently my amniotic sac is still bulging out, yet it's totally fine to be up and around (and the doctor even said I could go wandering through the hospital...that's another odd story that I'll add if I feel motivated).  I'm also still bleeding ("bloody show" or whatever...could be just messing around with my cervix, but it's way more than the "usual").  The decision was made to pull me off all monitors, so no idea either at how many contractions I had past a certain time.  Basically, they're putting me in a hospital bed, giving me free reign, and expecting me to declare when it's time to have a baby.

But do I want to know?  Is it going to help to have continuous monitoring so that I analyze every change, expectantly?  If something major did show up, am I ready to be whisked away, thinking that birth is imminent, only to have it stall out again (isn't this the dilemma of every pregnant woman?)?

So anyway, in replaying more moments through my mind, I can't help but wonder what could have been done differently.  I was pretty keen to get terbutaline the first time (in triage) to stop contractions.  Should I have declined that?  If I'd declined that first dose, would they still have wanted to give me more to afford that time to get antibiotics into me?  Did all of that terbutaline stall things out TOO much?  Should I have turned down the stadol?  I have no idea what that did to the labor stuff.  Would an epidural have been better, or a possibility?  In the end, what are all of these drugs doing to the baby?  She has been going absolutely crazy inside!

As a last bit...I'm also becoming so depressed because I'm starting to dissociate this whole process with an end result...a baby.  I have to remind myself that she is GOING to come out, and all of this will be a crazy memory, but in the here and now, it's almost difficult to bond with her while she's on the inside...and hard to come to realize that she's going to be the same baby on the outside very soon.

While this was all very deep and stuff...I still don't feel like I've adequately sorted everything through in my head.  But I do know that last night was the one of the first times that I felt quite secure in the thought that I was going to have a baby.  Kids were taken care of.  Mike was with me.  Everything was in a good place.  I really just hope that the time is perfect in the same way when it finally does happen.

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