Many of you may already know about our pre-term labor experience, but for those who don’t, I’ll explain briefly. So I get urinary tract infections really easily, and a fun side effect of pregnancy is getting urinary tract infections more easily, so I ended up having to be put on antibiotics many times and dealing with symptoms of such. Not fun at all, especially since I didn’t like the thought of all those meds going straight to my little unborn baby and hoping it would have no effect on her. Anyway, one day I wasn’t feeling very well and thought I had another infection coming on. I had a prenatal appointment that day, so I waited until that, where I did a urine sample and sent it in for a culture. After my appointment, I felt steadily worse though and eventually ended up in a lot of pain and couldn’t even fall asleep. Eventually I threw up and got chills and that’s when I decided it was time to call the on-call midwife and see what I should do. She called my OB (I had an OB as well that I saw every now and then just in case things turned sour and I needed to deliver in the hospital instead of the birth center) and they both agreed that I needed to go to the hospital immediately and that I probably had a kidney infection. The thing about kidney infections during pregnancy is that they are much harder to treat and you basically have to go to the hospital to get it taken care of. So when we got there, they monitored the baby and checked my cervix and it was discovered that I was dilated to a 4 and was having contractions at 3 minutes apart. The other thing about infections during pregnancy is that they can cause preterm labor, which is exactly what was happening here. Interestingly enough, I had no idea I was having contractions so close together. Many of them I didn’t even feel and the only way I knew I was having one was because of the rising line on the monitor.
So then I was taken to a room in labor and delivery, just in case things progressed, but I was also given some medication to stop the contractions and then also put on an antibiotic through an IV to treat the infection. We had left for the hospital about midnight, and by this time it was almost five in the morning. Then Brandon and I decided to get some rest after eating something real quick (I was starving because I had vomited the little food I was able to eat for dinner and hadn’t had anything since lunch time). Anyhow, long story short, I ended up staying in the hospital through to the next day (Friday) and then went home Saturday afternoon. Unfortunately, my baby shower was planned for that Saturday, so I had to call and write on facebook to everyone that the shower was canceled and I’d let them know when it would be rescheduled. That was crazy!
Anyhow, so then I was released from the hospital (which, by the way, St. Luke’s is a wonderful hospital. They took such great care of me and were all very nice. I would recommend them to anyone who wants to do a hospital birth and if things would have gone in that direction, I would have felt very good about giving birth at that hospital) and we went home. I had to stay on the medication for keeping contractions back since I wasn’t quite full term yet and I also had to take an antibiotic. It wasn’t much fun though because the medications made me have a headache, and then I felt dizzy sometimes, and then my ankles swelled up a little, and weirdest of all, I got red, hot patches on my ankles and thighs that felt like a sunburn. My midwife later told me that it was because of the medication for contractions. It’s actually a medication for slowing down blood, so basically my blood was pooling up a bit, thus causing the redness, warmness, and swelling. Bleh.
My mom was very sweet and came to help me out since I was supposed to take it easy for a while. I wasn’t necessarily on bed rest, but I wasn’t supposed to do a lot either. My mom is amazing by the way. J
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