I wake up early Saturday morning, and the house is still quiet with sleep. But my body is not. I am contracting like crazy. They came back sometime in the middle of the night after that dreaded trip to Wal-Mart. So I put myself back on the monitor and record them. I really want to push the little button on my pump that will deliver a brethine bolus, but the nurses at the company that manages it have warned me not to do this without them telling me to do so. They keep track, it would seem, and more boluses means I use more of the medicine, which is shipped to my house in pre-determined quantities.
My unscientific timing had the contractions at about every 3 minutes or so until 8 AM, which is when the pump delivers an automatic bolus, and when they call back, the nurse tells me that the monitor picked up 8 contractions in the first half hour, and that they seemed to slow down after that. She tells me the usual, to drink plenty of fluid, to bolus myself, and to run another strip about 20 minutes or so after the bolus has been delivered.
I do as I am told, and run another strip. The nurse calls back, and can hear the tears in my voice through the phone. She is genuinely worried and I have had 20 contractions in that last hour. She asks me how I am feeling, and with my mental filter no longer in place, I am brutally honest: "Like shit", I say. Not "I feel terrible" or any other combo of words I would normally use when speaking to someone in a professional capacity. I am beyond caring about that at this point. She tells me she is going to call my doctor, and I wait.
Dr. D is on call. She is the one who almost sent me to OB Mecca at 21 weeks. When I finally talk to her, I remind her that I just left OB Mecca on last week, and plead with her not to send me back to that place. Se gives me her cell number so I no longer have to go through the paging service to reach her for the day, and gives me some instructions: take 3 tylenol, drink a ton of water, and lay on my left side. Then she wants me to call her on her cell in half an hour. She also tells me that until I reach 32 weeks, if I have to go to the hospital, it will be OB Mecca, and she knows how I feel about it, so she is trying to avoid it. I tell her I will do anything, even standing on my head if I have to. I am ovewhelmed with gratitude at this point. Most doctors would argue that I have to go. Instead, my team of doctors really does listen to me, and tries to keep my feelings in mind. They send me when I need to go, and will not hesitate when it is necessary. But instead of making me rush off to the hospital each and every time, they take me into consideration. After all, I have been hospitalized 5 times since January 29th. If I ran everytime I had these contractions, I would have been at the hospital every day.
So for a few hours, I am in constant contact with both my doctor and the nurse at the monitoring center. Through rest and boluses, the contractions start to spread out, and I am relieved. The nurse wants me to reprogram my pump with her over the phone. My dosage for my continuous infusion is increased, as is for my automatic boluses and the demand boluses, and they move those to every 3 hours instead of every 4 hours. By the time all this is done, the contractions have spread even further: 8 minutes apart. My doctor is pleased with this,and tells me to not hesitate to call her cell for the rest of the day if needed. She also tells me "no more going to Wal-Mart". And that she will assume that if she does not hear from me, that all is okay. And she also says the dreaded word: Bedrest. What I have been trying to avoid from the minute I discovered myself to be pregnant.
So with that, I have avoided hospitalization yet again.
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