Birthing Day - Part 1

So, very early Sunday morning Rob came home from having a beer with Chris right as I was getting out the tub. He was watching me towel off when he noticed the expression on my face. The expression on my face was anxiety. There was pink on the towel, and I showed Rob. "I'm not ready!!" I hyperventilated to him. "Call your doctor." "I don't want to. I'm not ready. Besides, sometimes you lose your plug and it's days or even weeks before you go into labor."

After a few minutes of this, he made me call my midwife. Well, my midwife wasn't there. The OB, whom I had never seen, called me back. "I've been having Braxton Hicks all day, well I thought they were Braxton Hicks because they weren't that painful, but I just got out of the bathtub, and I think I've lost part of my mucus plug." She asked me a few questions and told me that "You probably have a bladder infection. If you're still having pain on Monday, come into the office and we'll do a test."

Ok. Sure. Well, I called my neighbor Brandi to see if she could loan me some pads and she and her sis-in-law headed down. They stayed for a couple of hours sharing their birth stories with me and then they left so I could try and get some rest.

Well, my cramps had been steadily getting worse, but I refused to acknowledge this so I crawled into bed next to Rob, who was timing my "not-contractions" with my IPhone. I finally managed to fall asleep in between the pain and woke up an hour or two later to shake Rob awake: "It really hurts." I didn't want to call the OB again - for one thing, I didn't like her - but Rob made me. I told her I thought I was in labor and thought my contractions were five minutes apart, but I wasn't sure.

She told me to go ahead and head to the hospital; seriously, that's it. This made me upset, because my midwife had told me she would talk with me on the phone for awhile so that she could gauge where I was so I didn't get to the hospital too early. But my midwife wasn't available, so what could I do?

We ran around getting the bags packed (because I still had weeks left to pack them, you know) while I hunched over in pain every few minutes. I thanked my lucky stars that I had sucked it up for those painful moments I had spent Saturday morning hunched over to shave my legs. Rob took the bags to the car, and we were off the hospital.