39 Weeks- Just One More To Go!

     We have just 7 days left until the due date. Just one more week left and I'm ready to meet our little girl. It's been quite an exciting week and I'm hoping we get to meet Lucy sooner rather than later with all the positive labor signs. Since I was induced with Roxas I never got to experience any spontaneous labor signs. My pregnancy with Roxas was pretty free of any labor signs really. This pregnancy is a drastically different story. I've been having on and off contractions for a good two weeks but on Saturday we had a very nice dress rehearsal of sorts for the big day.
     It was 8:00pm and I was just minding my own business working on knitting a hat and I noticed some pains but nothing concrete and I continued my work. Then by 10:00 the pains had not gone away, and had sorted themselves into something regular and rather painful. I paced around the house with pretty intense contractions debating whether or not they were "the real thing" and by 10:30 I was beginning to think it might actually be real. The contractions were coming about 5 minutes apart and lasting a minute and a half to two minutes or more by 11:30. We called my parents so my dad could watch Roxas and then we headed off to the hospital.
     They hooked me up to the monitor and saw I was indeed having regular contractions.

     I mean look at those nice contractions. The nurse said I was 3cm dilated but still at 50% and she wanted me to try and make some progress before calling the doctor at 2am. If I was able to progress to 4cm in that time I would be admitted and we would be having a baby. So we were sent off to walk for an hour. We walked...and walked...and walked. I was just praying for that extra 1cm. We returned from our walk and I hadn't changed at all. The doctor still wanted me to stay on an outpatient basis and be monitored all night. Throughout the night I still had regular contractions but I made the mistake of falling asleep. I'm convinced sleeping contributed to labor stalling out. It happened with Roxas too. Lucy had some variables in her heart rate, and some decreases but she seemed to be doing fine. At 6:30am the nurse checked me again and I had made a whole whopping half centimeter progress. Not promising.
     The doctor came in and confirmed my glaring lack of progress and since I was only 38 weeks she had no valid medical reason to intervene (I was hoping she would break my water and get labor back on track). I was sent home disappointed and very tired.

     The last few weeks of pregnancy are by far the absolute worst. You're ready to go and just want to meet this little wiggleworm already. The days stretch on for what seems like weeks though. Everybody and their uncle is telling you surefire ways to start labor, as if you haven't tried every single one of them. The waiting is bad enough but what really makes it hard is the teasing. Knowing my body went into labor once but stalled is unbelievably frustrating, if I'm going to have a spontaneous labor then let's get this thing going already. Then there are the contractions. I am still having annoyingly irregular and painful contractions which are making me physically exhausted. I will get runs of 5-10 contractions 5-10 minutes apart but they never continue and just leave me feeling as if I've been doing ab exercises all day. It's a painful and tired existence for sure.

     I'm really hoping to have made some progress by our appointment this Friday but I don't have high hopes. I've kind of resigned myself to just being induced again. As much as I'm not a fan of Pitocin I think it's inevitable we will meet again. When the doctor went over the consent for Pitocin (she has you go over this well before labor so you actually listen) I asked her about induction and she said the plan would be similar to that with Roxas. If we don't have Lucy by our last appointment on the 2nd then we will be induced on the 3rd. I've made my feelings very clear about wanting to avoid another induction and at every appointment I get the same answer: "We will see". It doesn't sound like I'm going to change her mind.

So until next time, I can hope maybe the next post will involve a birth story...