Life On the Couch.

Well, it looks like I will be living on the couch at least for the next couple of weeks. We had a very frustrating and scary weekend which ended with my being discharged from the hospital on bedrest until 34 weeks. I am allowed to get up to take a 15-minute shower and to go to the bathroom, and that's pretty much it. Which sounds like it would be fabulous, but in reality gets very old after about the first 15 minutes, especially when you have a mile-long to-do list you are itching to knock out before your baby gets here! Which, with any luck, will be later rather than sooner, especially if I stick to my bedrest. *sigh

Thankfully, my mom is here to help and is trying to get some of the items on my list scratched off before she takes the kiddos down to Mena for an extended stay at Camp Garner and Papa while I continue my couch bonding. We considered having her stay here, but if you could see the kids buzzing around me like little bees and Norah climbing all over me like I am a human jungle gym, you would see that perhaps even bedrest is not all that restful when my 3 kiddos are involved! : )

I will miss them, though, and I am just hoping the 2 weeks will go by really, really fast. I worry that little Norah will forget me, and then when she gets back, either the baby will already be here or will be coming any time, and then things will be even more topsy-turvy for her. Poor sweet girl. I hope she does okay with all of it.

Anyway, back to this weekend, in which pretty much everything went exactly the opposite of what we were wanting, with the notable exception of the fact that Shiloh is still inside me! On Thursday night, my friend Elizabeth was FINALLY in the hospital having her baby. She was overdue and had been desperate to get that sweet little girl out of her for a good couple of weeks, so when we heard it was time to push, we all headed up to the hosptial in Rogers to be there to get an early peek at baby Emmy. Unfortunately, once we got there, we found out that the pushing was not going so great, and they thought it was going to be a while. After hanging around for a bit in the waiting room and with Norah and a massive entourage of Elizabeth's family and friends, Jason and I decided we would head on home and come back in the morning to see the baby, who ended up arriving by c section after 26 1/2 hours of labor for poor Elizabeth. After all that, she wouldn't fit! It seems like babies pretty much have a mind of their own about how and when they are going to get here. Speaking of which...

That night, I had a hard time getting to sleep because I noticed that the baby didn't seem to be moving very much. I finally fell asleep at around midnight 2 kicks and 30 minutes into a kick count. I woke up at 6 a.m., still worried about the baby. I was having some contractions, which were getting a bit uncomfortable, but I decided they were probably fine and headed downstairs to eat some breakfast and lie down to try another kick count. I ate some yummy zucchini bread from Allison (thank you!) and drank some milk, then laid down on the couch to see if he would wake up for me. He did, at least somewhat, and we finished the kick count in about an hour. Granted, it usually only takes about 5-10 minutes, but I decided this was acceptable. Unfortunately, while I laid there, I noticed that I was also having several uncomfortable contractions in a row, so I figured I would go take a nice, warm bath to relax. I soaked in the tub and read for a while, then after drying off, I noticed I was having some spotting. (Sorry if that's TMI, but it is a key part of what goes down, so oh well!)

Well, since I was planning on going up to the hospital to visit Emmy anyway, and my clinic happens to be attached to the hospital, I decided I might as well go in and have them take a peek at me while I was up there so that they could tell me I was just fine and I wouldn't have to worry. So at 9:30, Jason and Norah and I made our way up to Rogers with plans of a brief and reassuring doctor's visit followed by some cuddling with a sweet little newborn baby girl and probably a stop off at Wal-Mart to continue my registry tour.

Unfortunately, that's not exactly how the day went down.

DISCLAIMER: I am not a medical professional, and all of the following descriptions of tests and stuff are told according to the best of my recollection and with the best of my understanding. Which may not always be totally accurate, so if you know better than I do, feel free to correct me! I was pretty drugged up for a lot of this anyway, so this description is the best I could do!

Anyway...

I got to the doctor's office and they decided to do a non-stress test on the baby and a fetal fibronectin test on me. The stress test would make sure that they baby was still doing okay in there, and the fetal fibronectin test would hopefully provide us with a little reassurance. If it came back negative, that would mean that there was a 99.8% chance that I would not go into labor in the next 2 weeks.

I had never had a non-stress test before, but I decided right away that it would make me feel better, because it involved hooking me up to a contraction and fetal heart rate monitor and having me push a little button whenever the baby moved, and then somebody that knew what they were doing would look at the strip and make sure Shiloh was doing okay. That was what I really wanted to know, so I was on board. Shiloh was pretty awake while I was doing it, so despite my continued contractions, I was fairly confident that we would pass the non-stress test with flying colors and then I would feel much better about the way things were going so that we could head on over to see baby Emmy without a cloud of worry hanging over our heads.

Unfortunately, they came and interrupted my test after just a few minutes and said they wanted me to go over to the hospital for observation and a shot of terbutaline because of the contractions. Well, I was not too thrilled about this. Going to the hospital was not part of my plan for the day. After repeated assurances that it was probably fine and was just for observation, I headed over to the labor and delivery floor for a shot and some more monitoring while Jason and Norah went to the 2nd floor to check me in.

Everything that happened from here until about yesterday afternoon is a big blur in my head. First they hooked me up to a monitor and gave me a shot of terbutaline to try to get the contractions to stop. By this point, the contractions were about 7 minutes apart. When the shot still wasn't working after a while, they decided to check me and discovered that I was now a fingertip dilated, which also did not fit in with my plan for the day. Shortly after this, we got the results of the fetal fibronectin test in. We were all counting on this to be negative, and I'm afraid I did not react very well. When the doctor came in and said it was positive, I vaguely recall sitting up straight in the bed and saying something to the effect of "POSITIVE? It was supposed to be NEGATIVE." They tried to calm me down by assuring me that a positive result was not a guarantee that I was going to go into labor and only meant that I was at increased risk, but all I could think was that it was supposed to be negative.

At that point, everything started going really fast. They gave me a dose of steroids to try and help Shiloh's lungs mature and then started me on Magnesium Sulfate to try and stop the contractions. At some point they checked my cervix, and I had gone from long and thick and closed when I first arrived at the hospital to 30% effaced and 1 cm at some point along the way. Frustrating. They also discovered on the ultrasound that I apparently have too much amniotic fluid, which is probably making the contractions worse.

Eventually, with lots of IV fluids, the magnesium and some painkiller called Nubain, the contractions slowed down and eventually subsided. They kept me in the hospital for a couple of days, giving me another dose of the steroids and weaning me off of the magnesium to make sure the contractions would not come immediately back when I went off it.

They didn't come back, and on Sunday afternoon, they released me on the condition that I would stay on bedrest once I got home. So until 34 weeks, here I sit. The doctor said he was pretty sure I would make it to at least 32 weeks (which would be tomorrow), that I might make it to 33 weeks, and that it would be possible for me to get to 34 weeks, but he wouldn't count on it. I would very much like to fall in the "don't count on it" range of this estimate, so please pray with me that we get to AT LEAST 34 weeks.

I really, really, really don't want Shiloh to have to spend a long time in the NICU. It is heart-breaking to have to go home without your baby, and to have other people be in charge of him and tell you when you can see him and hold him and feed him. Also, if he gets here very soon, it will be so much harder on his little body. As long as he is in me, he gets to be relaxed and just grow and have an easy time of things, and once he is out, he will have a lot of work to do and have to have so many tubes and wires hooked up to him and have to get pricked with needles a bunch of times a day, which is no way to have to come into the world. The longer we can avoid him getting here, the better. So we need AT LEAST 2 more weeks. Please.

In the meantime, I am going to just sit here on the couch and try to get a better attitude. I have spent most of today feeling anxious and a little sorry for myself, which can't be helping things. Instead, I will take Jason's advice and try to focus on the things I am thankful for:

1. At least we made it this far. 32 weeks is much better than 26, 28 or 30 weeks.
2. Shiloh is nice and big for his age. He was estimated at 4 pounds, 10 ounces on Friday, which means that he will probably hit 5 pounds by this Thursday if all goes well. This is very good.
3. We live near great hospitals that have good NICUs.
4. I am stil pregnant, and my water isn't broken.
5. I have a wonderful safety net of family and friends who are here to help us get through this mess. I do not know what I would do without all of them.

So that's where we are now. On the couch, still pregnant, and trying to be thankful. I guess it could be a lot worse, so I should just count my blessings and try to enjoy my time of rest. It will probably be the last good rest I get for many years to come, so I'll try to just think of it as the world's most boring vacation. : )

Thanks for reading and for praying for us, and I'm sure I'll be blogging from the couch again at some point in the near future. What else do I have to do, after all?