In typical Hacker style, our baby is fashionably late. Here is a little update of what has happened over the past few days. My apologies for the long post, but as usual, I just don't know what to cut out. :)
Friday night, just as I am sitting down to enjoy a celebratory mug of beer (we just reached a major milestone on the project I have been working on all year) with my work colleagues, Melissa calls me. She's visiting at her parents, and her cramps/contractions(?) are back, they are stronger than before, she's been timing them, and they are about 7 minutes apart. Cool! She says not to hurry, but come over as soon as I can. So much for celebrating with the guys... so I head on over to Melissa's parents.
First thing I notice is that the baby has definitely dropped quite a bit. At the top of Melissa's belly, where there used to be baby, there is now this squishy empty space. Very cool. :) So I fire up the trusty Android Stopwatch on my phone, and yep, contractions are consistently 7 minutes apart. While we are waiting for dinner to be finished, I suggest we go for a walk, as that is a typical method of progressing labour and keeping your mind off the pain. So we go and walk around the block a few times, slowing down for about 1 minute in every 7. I can tell that they are worse than before, but from watching her face I am thinking about a 4/10 on the pain scale. Okay, so not so bad. No emergency at least, so we walk for a bit more. The contractions continue throughout the night, but are very manageable, so eventually we go home and have a good night's sleep.
Saturday morning, Melissa wakes up, the contractions are gone. Doh. Okay, well Melissa's Mom has offered to come over and help do some cleaning, so after the 3 of us head out to our favourite breakfast place, Cora's, she comes over, and we get a ton of things done. I finally, spurred on by Friday night's events, get the infant seat base installed in our car. It's soooo easy, new cars have these UAS brackets that you just snap the mounting straps for the base into and tighten. We also, among other things, work together to get all of our windows cleaned. That was great, we don't do that very often because its such a pain.
So Saturday night, we decide that we need to go and buy some groceries, so we head over to Metro, because everywhere else is closed. Just as we are heading into the store, Melissa tells me that her contractions are back and they are a bit stronger than last night. Again, clearly not tear your head off pain, but you can tell that she staggers a bit more when one comes on. So again with the stopwatch. 5 minutes apart, and each longer than a minute. Whoh, this the threshold that the doctor has given us. The only thing missing is Melissa "huffing and puffing like a freight train," as the doctor so eloquently puts it. So we start to question ourselves, should we go to the hospital? These don't seem that bad, but maybe Melissa has a high pain tolerance. We head on home, but keep on timing them for a bit. After we get back to our couch, they all start coming at around 4 minutes apart. This goes on for over half an hour, getting a bit stronger as they go on. So, that's it, we figure, maybe we should go to the hospital, just in case, after all, they seem to keep getting shorter.
So we head up to the hospital at around 9 pm. They check the baby and check her cervix. Baby is great, still moving around and heart beating strong. Her cervix is still just over 4 cm, just like on Thursday. So, they say, that doesn't mean that something isn't happening. After all, the contractions are still going the entire time, but they aren't as strong as they would expect. So they send us for an hour walk, to see if things will progress. Along the walk, we meet another couple who are doing the same thing. She is only dilated 3 cm, but when she had a contraction, you could clearly see the huffing and puffing that the Doc was talking about. After an hour we head back for another check. Baby's still doing good. The nurse said that her cervix has only dilated a bit, maybe a bit less than 0.5 cm, but it was getting more stretchy. Okay, well, stretchy sounds good.
They send us out for another hour walk, our friends are doing the same thing. Good news from the other couple, she's up to 4 cm now! That's good news. This entire time Melissa's contractions keep going, getting a bit stronger, but during the second walk, the times start jumping around a bit. 3.5 minutes apart for about 5, then 2.5 minutes apart for about 5, then back to 4 for a while. Very odd. So, we finish up our second walk and head back. Baby's still great, but her cervix hasn't dilated any more at all. They say that the contractions are well spaced, but aren't strong enough yet to do the hard work of dilating the cervix past about 4 cm.
They give us a choice, go for a 3rd walk, or head on home to get some sleep, pending doctor approval. At this point (somewhere after 3:30am) we are pretty tired, we'd have no trouble going on if we were getting somewhere, but at this point we go for the sleep option. :) Doctor approves, and we are on our way. They tell us to come back if there is significant bleeding, her water breaks, or the contractions get hard to manage. We go home, get some sleep, and the contractions end up stopping completely Sunday afternoon sometime. Definitely glad we took the "go home" option.
As an aside, as the nurse was checking with the doctor if we could go home, we heard the one nurse report the other girl was up to 5 cm and they were being admitted. We were quite happy for them. Later we realized, the funny thing is, we probably walked around with them for well over an hour, but we have no idea what their names are. All the time we were walking around, we were focused on the task at hand, and talked about pregnancy, labour, devliery, babies, etc. It was really great to be able to talk about the situation with someone else going through it at the same time.
Anyway, the only other event was that Melissa woke me up last night around 3:30 am with a very strong contraction, which was hopeful, but the only thing that happened after that was 2 minor little echoes. Back to sleep. This morning Melissa called the doctor's office to let them know what the current state of affairs is. They call back and let her know that since she has been having something resembling contractions and the baby is still quite active, they don't need to do another ultrasound and they are just going to schedule her to be induced on Thursday. So either way, the baby should be born by the end of the week at the latest! In the meantime we will continue attempting to induce labour in our own way... (by this, we mean long walks, of course).
So, anyway, I'm back to work today, and Melissa is at home getting some extra sleep. At least one of us will be rested for when the baby actually starts coming. And really Melissa is the one who will need all of the strength and energy, so I'm glad she is getting her rest.
Whew, what a long post. I don't mind making a bit of a longer one, hopefully you don't mind reading it. At this point, I don't expect I will make any more posts until Melissa is admitted to give birth. At that point, I will use the handy email gateway that I posted about a week or so ago to keep you all up to date. But in any case, for the time being, take heart, one way or another, Baby Hacker is coming soon!
