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My birthday was this past Friday, and I was off work, which made a nice start to my birthday. Mike was going to take me out for dinner that night, and possibly to Cold Stone for ice cream, too! I had a doctor’s appointment that afternoon for a check up on the baby, but I was hoping they wouldn’t do too much to me, and I’d still feel well enough to head out to dinner.
So I went to the appointment, and the nurse came in and said something about having to do the 3 hour glucose test- well, they hadn’t told me about that yet. I did the 1 hour test a while back, but they didn’t call me about my results. I guess I didn’t pass, so now I have to go back for the 3 hour test. Okay fine. No big deal. Not fun, but no big deal. Then they tell me that they have to do another test on my cervix because of results from a different test they ran the last time. Great…
So they do this test called a Colposcopy where they rub vinegar on my cervix so they can observe the cells around it to make sure there aren’t any abnormal cells. If they find abnormal cells, they usually biopsy. The test begins, and let me tell you, that is not a fun test. Well, the doctor was unable to even observe my cervix because as soon as she took the swab away, I started bleeding, and all she could see was that blood. Yuck! They send me off then to finish the rest of my evening. Happy Birthday to me.
I did not feel like doing much of anything the rest of the day, so Mike and I went home, and he bought me pizza (Papa John’s- yum!) and when I arrived at home there was a box on the porch- flowers from Mike! They are just beautiful, I’ll have to get a picture of them up on the gallery page. That night we just kind of hung out at home, and went to bed early because we had a birthing class at Anaheim Memorial Hospital the next day.
Thus begins the 27th of May-
We get ready for our class, but by the time we’re getting ready to leave, I start having this sharp pain in my abdomen. Well, it didn’t feel bad enough for me to think that something was wrong with the baby, so I thought we’d just go to the class. Besides, if it turns out something is wrong, I’m at a hospital already, in a class with a bunch of pregnant people taught by a nurse. I think I’m in good hands! We started the class, and I asked the teacher about the pain I was experiencing. She thought it might be round ligament pain, so I thought, well, just chalk it up to being pregnant. You don’t feel good when you’re pregnant, and that’s just part of it. But it got worse. Way worse. So after lunch I talked to the teacher again, and described exactly what I was feeling, and she said that wasn’t normal at all, so why don’t I go upstairs to the Labor and Delivery wing, and just get checked out. So up we go to the 3rd floor to see what they can find out about me.
I checked in, and got to a room, and then they hooked me up to the monitors to check on baby and make sure I wasn’t contracting. Well, turns out I was contracting, but that wasn’t the pain I was feeling. The nurse calls the doctor to find out what could be wrong and he suggests doing a catheter to get a sample of my urine to make sure my bladder’s okay. Well, those are just a laugh riot let me tell you… Fun times! But before they do that, they decide to give me a shot of Terbutaline to stop the contractions, but don’t decide to tell me the side effects. So after a painful shot, they do a catheter, and then leave and I start having a reaction to the Terbutaline. My lungs start getting really tight, and then my heart starts racing, and I break out into a sweat. Mike calls in the nurse, cuz I’m starting to hyperventolate thinking that something is horribly wrong with me, and a different nurse comes in and says, “they didn’t warn you that this would happen? It’s because of the shot we just gave you.” And then they put an EKG on me, to monitor my heart rate, which by this time was going through the roof. But the contractions had stopped. Mind you, the pain that landed me up there hadn’t changed one bit, but the contractions that I couldn’t even feel had stopped. Well, they decide later, after I started having contractions again that they needed to give me another shot of Terbutaline, but this time I was prepared for the side effects, so they didn’t really affect me all that much. It’s a lot easier to take weird things happening in your body when they give you a reason for them happening! So after that shot, they monitored me for a bit longer, and when they were satisfied that I wasn’t going into labor, they sent me home. All the test results had come back negative, and I wasn’t contracting anymore. So they gave me Maalox Plus, saying that maybe it was heartburn (HEARTBURN?!?!?!?!) and gave me a pill form of Terbutaline, and told me to get dressed and go home. Well, I couldn’t dress because the pain (yes, this would be the pain that landed me in there in the first place) was too strong. Way worse than it was when I went up there. But they didn’t know what it was, so they sent me home. The nurse had to help me get dressed, and then they got a wheelchair to get me out to the car. I was miserable. While we were in there, we ended up calling my doctor (or at least the doctor on-call from my practice) and she said that if it gets any worse to go in to Long Beach Memorial, where I was planning on delivering, but if it stays the same to call her the next day to give her an update. So home I went feeling worse than when I went in to the hospital.
I stayed on the couch the rest of the night, and long about 11pm I was in such pain, I couldn’t stand it any longer, and we called the doctor, and she had me head over to the hospital. I got to the hospital, and they then tried to play the “what’s wrong with you” game. I believe at this point they took blood to see if anything was weird with that, and they ordered an ultrasound to measure amniotic fluid to make sure that the baby was okay. The fluid was great, the blood test showed nothing, and the baby monitor showed a baby that was, according to the doctor, healthier than many babies that she sees at full term! But I was still in pain. And a lot of it. They eventually did a cervical exam just to make sure that baby wasn’t planning on coming any time soon, and I can’t really remember exactly what else went on that trip to the hospital, but they quieted down the contractions that I was still having, not with Terbutaline, but I can’t remember what they did- nothing traumatic, though, or I would have remembered it! At 3am they gave me the option of staying the night, or going home, and I chose going home after I was able to dress myself, and convinced that I would at least be somewhat okay. They sent me home with an Ambien (sleeping aid) and told me to rest. Well the Ambien was great, and I slept well that night, with only waking up a couple of times to reposition or go to the bathroom.
On to the 28th of May…
Sunday morning comes, and I’m awakened by the phone, but couldn’t answer it in time. It was the doctor checking up on me. She called back an hour later, and talked to Mike who told her that I was able to sleep, and seemed to be feeling better. I still felt fairly yucky, but I wasn’t in the extreme pain that I was the day before. So I just took it easy that day, but by dinner was still having the same pain that I was the day before, just not as bad. Or at least I didn’t feel it so long as I didn’t move. By 8pm I was hurting pretty bad again, so yet another call to the doctor! She says to come in to the hospital, and this time she’s not letting me leave until I have a diagnosis. So off we go again. Back once more to Long Beach Memorial. By the time we reached the hospital I couldn’t stand up straight, but I could still kind of walk, so Mike let me off at the main entrance, and I walked in to the front desk. He asked if I wanted a wheelchair, but warned me it could take a while, so I decided to just suffer without. So I walked in all hunched over, and headed up to Labor and Delivery. I filled out the paperwork that I needed to fill out, and by that time Mike had gotten to the desk, too, and they had us wait in the waiting room until they had a room available. So we get in to the room, and they take 3 vials of blood, and say that they want to do another catheter to check once again and make sure I don’t have anything else weird going on. Fun! They also ordered another ultrasound, but this time in radiology to check out all my internal organs to make sure I wasn’t having an issue with my gallbladder, spleen, kidneys, or appendix. The ultrasound showed everything looking completely normal, except for my right kidney looked “annoyed” which is very common among pregnant people. But they couldn’t find my appendix. Usually an ultrasound only shows an unhappy appendix, so radiology checked me out with a clean bill of health. But I was still in major pain. At this point they moved me to another room, and another nurse. The nurse in the first room reminded me of a navy gal- kinda harsh, but still knew what she was talking about. (The nurse at Anaheim was a bit on the older side, and I wasn’t so sure she understood everything I was saying… The first nurse at Long Beach was by far my favorite. Her name was Cathy, and she was sarcastic and funny.) She had a thick New York accent, and was your typical New Yorker. In the second room I got a new nurse. Her name was Gay, and her bedside manner was nill. She was I believe Filippino, and had an accent, but was difficult to understand. I guess that went both ways because she didn’t seem to understand me either. She would either tell me how I was feeling, in the form of a question and leave the room before I could answer, or ask me a million times what I had said as if I were speaking a foreign tongue. And who knows, to her maybe I was! So anyway, they get me in that room and tell me to sleep, but they also tell me that they are going to do another more in depth cervical exam at 1am to see if the baby is planning on coming in the next 2 weeks. Joy. By this time the contractions that had started up were quieting down again, and they had given me an IV with fluids so I would be getting enough. But then they tell me that I have to fast, because they aren’t sure what’s wrong, or what tests they will have to run. I had another weird pain episode in the middle of the night sometime where first my lungs felt like they were being pushed up into my ribcage, but more so than when the baby would kick, and then the really strong pain transfered into my back, and caused me to feel like I wanted to fold myself up backwards, folding my shoulder blades up behind me. I called the nurse, and she told me to empty my bladder, because that’s what the problem was. Um.. no, it was not the problem, my BACK was going through spasms. So anyway, I guess somewhere in the middle of that whole thing, Gay went on break, so Judy, the New Yorker, and Maribelle, another nurse, among who knows who else came in the room to see what was wrong. All I knew was that I was in extreme pain, and they put an egg crate mattress on the bed, and got me back in bed, though I was still in pain, and didn’t really know what was going on. The pain finally subsided, and Judy called my doctor again who said that she had no idea what other tests to run on me, but to ask the Neo-natal doctor for more suggestions. Well, that doctor suggested doing a CT scan of my pelvis and abdomen to make sure everything was okay. At around 2am they had me drink 3 cups of what they called “Contrast”, but I call a combination of bad fruit punch, and cough syrup. So I drank that (though it was a welcome thing to be able to drink something- I had been off fluids except through my IV all night, and was incredibly thirsty.) I finished the Contrast, and Gay came back in wanting to know what had happened, so I filled her in as best I could, and she came in to draw more blood. She poked me to try and get blood out, but wasn’t very good at it, and said, “I can’t find your blood.” Umm, well, it’s there!! So she calls the lab to do it for her. Then she announces, once I start feeling sick from the Contrast, that she is going to do the cervical exam. Um, no thanks! You couldn’t find my blood, I certianly don’t want you poking around unable to find other things!!! So I refused the test, hoping that another nicer nurse could come do that exam later, if I had to do it at all. So the lab tech comes in and was extremely nice, got a vial of blood in no time, and was out to let me rest. I got probably a grand total of 45 minutes of sleep, max, in 15 min increments the whole night. Whee! So then I had to wait 2 hours for the Contrast to take effect, and then I went down to the lab where they ran the CT scan. They had me lay on a table, and put more Contrast mixed with saline in my IV, but clamped off my IV in order to do it. He said I would feel a warm sensation through my body as they gave it to me, and then he would run the test. The test didn’t take hardly any time, and yes, I did feel rather warm, but it wasn’t bad. Mike got to be with the tech, and see all my insides, too, which he said was pretty cool. So they sent me back up to my room, had me go to the bathroom before I laid back down, and then Gay came back in and saw my IV which was backed up (read: blood coming out of the IV, instead of saline going in), so she found where the tech guy had clamped it off, and Gay was very glad she caught it when she did, because it could have started to clot, then they would have had to do the IV all over again! Yikes!! Anyway, after that whole ordeal, they told me that it would take about an hour or so for the results from my test. Thankfully Gay was off by 7am, and a new nurse with an English accent came in. Her name was Janine, and kept calling me “Darling”. I liked her. By this time a new doctor was the on-call doctor- my regular doctor! She came in and asked “What on earth is going on with you, girl?” Anyway, we waited until around 10am for the results of the CT scan, but they still wouldn’t let me eat in case it showed that my appendix needed to be removed, and I can’t eat if they need to do that. Well, after the results came in, my doctor said that I am the picture of health, there is absolutely nothing wrong with my insides, so she started suggesting what it could possibly be that wouldn’t have shown up on the tests. One thing she mentioned kind of struck a chord with me- she said that some people have a seperation of the muscle at the front of their uterous, which is a soft tissue type injury brought on by the uterous stretching so much to make room for baby. Well, my whole life I have been prone to soft tissue injuries, and my doctor that treated me from birth has said that my tissues are just weak and prone to tearing. That made a lot of sense to me, because the pain that I have occurs when either I move the muscles in my stomach (get up, go to the bathroom, breathe deeply), or when the baby kicks me in that one spot. So that was the diagnosis, and the doctor sent me home after exhausting all other possibilities. She sent me home with pain medicine similar to Vicodin, though she said the best meds for this type of injury are ibuprofin types, which you can’t have while pregnant. Joy. But anyway, they said to not work this week at least, and to stay basically on bedrest until I feel up to moving around and to go in this week for a follow up appointment. My appointment is on Friday at 1:45pm, and then they will discuss whether or not I will return to work before the baby is born. My guess is that I will just stay home now until this baby comes, but hopefully will be able to move around more as time goes by.
So that was my weekend! Sounds like fun, huh? I have a 4D ultrasound next week that is currently scheduled for Wednesday, but may get moved to Monday if I can get an appointment then. And Boo goes in for a check up tomorrow, as I couldn’t get her in last week. Never a dull moment in this house, let me tell you!