"False Alarm"

Those two words have been uttered a lot today, by both me as well as folks inquiring as to our incidents yesterday. "So you had a false alarm yesterday?" and I knew they weren't inquiring about the status of my home security system.

First of all, the instructors of one of our classes suggested to everybody that we ask our doctor what the "trigger" was to head to the hospital. In other words, you wanna find the happy medium between being comfortable in your home and familiar surroundings (as opposed to laying on a hospital bed, waiting for things to progress) and having the baby's head crown on the seat of my Chevy TrailBlazer. The very next appointment, we posed the question to Dr. Bannister and her parameters were as follows: When the contractions are between 5-10 minutes apart, for at least an hour, head to the hospital.

Fast forward to early yesterday morning. As it turns out, Leah had never gotten a chance to fall asleep Sunday night, and woke me up around 1 AM. She said that the contractions were starting low, and then wrapping around--after which she had this urge to push. Well, that sounds pretty accurate. So about 2:00AM, I enter the fatherly stopwatch-toting, data-collection mode. 2:33, then 2:39. Then another at 2:46, then one at 2:51. One at 2:57.........etc etc. Spot a pattern??

After a little more than an hour of this, we figured that Nicholas had decided that yesterday was his day. We were checked in around 4 AM, and waited for the assessment. All along, I think we were confident in our instruction, and figured that there was no way that we'd be going home without our son in tow--After all, hadn't we precisely followed the instructions? I just knew we'd be upgraded from triage to a real Labor/Delivery room and I'd get the cell phone fired up.

As if. After 30 minutes on the fetal heart monitor, the doc on call said to watch it for another hour. After that increment, a new doc on call instructed the nurse to pop our baby bubble for the day and send us home. The nurse said early on that she could've seen an argument for each scenario--there were circumstances around that might support staying, yet an equal number of arguments for sending us home. And it was the latter. Part of the discharge orders from Dr. "no go" including us going to see Dr. Bannister for her to assess the situation. After a quick shower and change of clothes, it was off to the office to be there when it opened at 8:30. At that point, it had already been a long morning, and we were both very tired.

The end result of all this was as follows: Yes, they were contractions, but weren't the "real deal." As in, they weren't the bent-over-in-pain, oh-my-gosh-that-hurts contractions that WILL indicate childbirth is upon us. The frustrating part was that nobody said "Well, look out for those annoying, non-significant contractions that will mislead you." Leah's blood pressure was slightly elevated, so the doctor took her off of work this week to keep her from developing any problems. Rest is a good thing, at this point. The two subjective "How close are you?" indicators, dialation and effacement, are at 4 cm and 70-80%, respectively. So even if we have to wait til Monday (when Leah will be induced), hopefully things will go smoothly and quickly.

Leah's still having the little contractions, so maybe the uterus is doing warmup laps before starting the race. Leah did get caught up on sleep, and this week should be full of anticipation and excitement. On so many levels, we're ready for Nicholas's arrival, and yesterday was a very bad tease.