10 Weeks of Fun Times Ahead!

Ah pregnancy, how do I love thee? Well, not as much as some people do, but I guess I shouldn't really complain because I really don't have a lot of issues that come with my pregnancies. However, as I've mentioned before, this one has been monumentally more uncomfortable and more painful than the last one, so I'll admit to some complaining. 

I hit 30 weeks yesterday, and to celebrate I decided to take a quick trip into Labor and Delivery at the hospital here to get checked out after having about 2 days of some pretty hard contractions, followed by a completely sleepless night where at one point I tried to get up to go to the bathroom and was completely bent over in pain. So after spending the morning soaking in the tub, drinking a TON of water and laying on my left side, I finally dropped Sophie off at a friends house and went in. Now, I had never set foot in the hospital before, even though it's in the same parking lot as my OB. So after painfully waddling around and asking directions, I made it to the labor and delivery area, filled out my paperwork, and got all settled in with my monitors. Ninja didn't like the monitors - he kicked and wiggled, and we had to adjust the fetal heart monitor about once every 20-30 minutes because he would either kick it out of the way or would flip so he wasn't in range anymore. They gave me lots and lots of water and an apple juice to sip one and told me to just hang out while the monitors did their thing. I watched some trashy court TV (unenthusiastic "yay.") and breathed through all of the contractions. Eventually they checked me to make sure that I wasn't dilating or thinning, which I wasn't (thank goodness!) and did a test to see my likelihood of having a premature baby. Pretty cool test in my book - they say it's 99% effective of predicting premature births up to 2 weeks out. Mine came back negative so we continued on with water and monitoring. 

After a while of watching spikes and plateau's on the monitors, they decided that dehydration wasn't the culprit here, so I got a nice little shot (seriously, the vial that the medicine came in was smaller than my thumbnail!) of Terbutaline. And for such a small amount of medicine, it sure has a kick to it! It burned like crazy going into my arm, and then made me so jittery that I tried to send a text (which I would have to type and then put on the side table as far away as I could reach because it was the only spot where I got 1 bar of signal - stupid phone) and failed miserably. Ninja got all hyper too and started flipping and kicking even more! Well this didn't help, so after some time had passed and a quick trip to the bathroom, they gave me another shot of it in my other arm. Now I was super DUPER jittery! Then they ordered the ultrasound (since Ninja kept swimming away from the monitor they wanted to check him out) and while his measurements came back completely fine and dandy (they also saw that he is still head down, which is good), they found out that I have a lot of excess fluid in my uterus. They looked at my chart and asked me 3 different times if I had gestational diabetes, to which I said no. Finally they explained that with GD it's normal to see this amount of fluid in the uterus, but without it, it's not. I asked what the effects of this were and was told (surprise surprise) that it can cause preterm contractions. Ha! The culprit was finally revealed!

You see, the extra fluid in there causes my uterus to stretch farther (makes sense). However, because the uterus is stretching so much, it has decided that it doesn't WANT to keep stretching, and so it fights back by trying to contract down a bit. This, of course, causes painful contractions and massive uncomfortable-ness for me. What does it do for the Ninja? Well, for now it gives him a LOT more space, which he loves. Because there's so much more room and he's not all confined and what-not, he's able to flip and spin and roundhouse kick to his little heart's desire all day long. He's happy as can be right now! However upon doing some reading after I got home, the downside to all of this extra freedom could come back as a negative later when it's time to deliver. For example, he may decide to flip or go sideways or otherwise not be in the right position when it's time to birth him, because he has the room to do it. Or when my water eventually breaks, the umbilical cord can be sort of "sucked" out first, meaning that he has a higher chance at being strangulated or otherwise impaired during the birthing process because of that being in the way. Both of these would lead to an emergency C-section. I'm not too worried - he's been in the birthing position for 3 weeks now, and they say that after 34 weeks the fluid will start to go down in volume a bit (hopefully!) so I think we'll be alright. 

So what now? Well, now I get to go on with life as normal. Regular routine and exercise, no bed rest or anything like that (Yay!) and just keep an eye on things. Oh, and also pray that my stomach doesn't just rip in half from it's insane size...because that would be bad. I'm still hoping that this little guy comes a little early, but when I say early I mean 37 weeks, not before then. In the meantime, you can watch my enormity grow and cross your fingers that we don't have to visit L&D until then! :)

And for your amusement - my giant 29 week, excessively fluid-filled belly picture. (I haven't taken one for 30 weeks yet, so this will do) :)