Wednesday, March 3, 2010

24 wks,4 days : In the Hospital

So there I am, in the hospital. I can no longer feel the contractions, so I think the mag sulfate is working. I know from my nurse that this is not the case. Mag relaxes the smooth muscle of the uterus, and this is how it stops contractions. But it hasn't stopped mine. I just cannot feel them anymore. She holds up my strip to show me, and there is literally not a flat area on it, as my uterus goes through waves of contractions, a new one starting every 2 minutes. "Andrea, this is an active labor pattern!", she tells me. Gradually, my dose of mag increases until I am on 3 grams. At this point I am maxed out on it. They start adding brethine boluses, and these seem to work.

I ask about my KB test, and discover that it was positive. I don't know what this means, so I call J, who is home with E, and ask him to google it for me. He cannot figure it out for me, and noone there knows how to interpret my weird result. And somehow, over the course of the night, I go from not being able to feel the contractions, to feeling them but not being in pain, to actually having discomfort. When I get to the point where I find myself having to stop and focus on my breathing through them, I let my nurse know. Something is different. Something has changed.

Somewhere around 5 AM, my doctor comes in. I feel terrible, as I know he isn't even on call for my practice anymore, as it has switched to the next day. But he has been awake on the phone with my nurse all night, and makes the special trip in to see me. But he explains the KB test, finally. It means that there has been a breach in my body, and that there are fetal blood cells in my blood sample. In other words, a hemorrhage has occured. It isn't bad, and I am not in excrutiating pain or gushing blood, so it is probably just mild trauma from the fall. What he is concerned about is the change in my contractions. And he seems apologetic as he tells me he is sending me over the river from Northern Kentucky into Cincinnati to what I mentioned in an earlier post as our OB mecca. He knows I don't want to go. I have terrible memories of that place from E's pregnancy, but he pats my leg and tells me that if I were his wife, and this were his son, that is where he would want me to be at that point. I am 23 weeks pregnant,and this hospital is known for their NICU, even keeping micropreemies alive at points when noone thought they were even viable. For Zachary, I have to go.

On a side note, I was started on my Celestone course for Zachary's lungs. Should be finished with that soon.

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