Another day

Today has been a pretty rough day overall and most of it has been spent completely horizontal in bed on my left side. Not a good day for me because it keeps me away from my daughter and husband and makes me a bit depressed to lay in a dark room and not have the ability to be social. If I do try to make it downstairs, I simply get frustrated with everything and my temper is very short, so I feel it's best to remove myself so I don't become "mean mommy."

The contractions are getting worse and aren't giving me a lot of time for rest or relief in between. After much monitoring, Jellybean is doing ok but has a relatively high heartbeat still. My contractions are moving around to my back and starting to look less like preterm labor and more like back labor since they start there for a few hours and then make their way around front. This isn't great because these can lead into full blown labor pretty quickly without a lot of warning, so it's pretty stressful. All of this started up late Thursday afternoon and has progressively gotten worse daily. Usually I feel ok in the mornings and early afternoons and then it starts to get really bad in the evening and through the night (apparently, hormones play some part in this and it isn't unusual, but it makes it very hard for doctors to catch it all on monitors at the office. When I was in on Tuesday, the dr. finally saw it in the evening and remarked, "Well, you weren't kidding when you said it was worse in the evening."

Friday it all started a bit earlier - about noonish and continued to get worse throughout the day. Today it's been literally all day. I never really slept last night because they never went away. At one point today, we were at two minutes apart with the back contractions, but we were supposed to wait until they made their way around front. As of right now, I've got the back contractions going about every three minutes and my stomach is just rock hard with no clearly discernible separate contractions that I can time. I am completely exhausted due to the lack of sleep and I hope that they will let up just a bit to give me a few hours tonight.

I'm hesitant to call the doctor because, at this point, nothing good will really come from it. Either I will have to go in to L&D and they won't see the contractions because they're primarily in my back and my stomach is rock hard (and if you've ever had this experience, you know that if they can't see the contractions, they must not exist. It's very very frustrating.) Or they will see something or call my doctor and I'm going to be stuck at the hospital until delivery. The doctor has made it pretty clear that this is more than likely what will happen if I end up in L&D with more problems. Granted, in the hospital she would give me some pain meds to help me sleep, but I'm going to be on strict bed rest and we are going to wait until my surgery date. If I can make it to Tuesday and become semi-mobile, there's a chance that just that bit of movement will allow me to go into labor just a bit sooner (again - not until she's ready and healthy, but even 36 weeks would be as far as I made it with Katie). Plus, my bed is here. My family is here. If I'm in the hospital again, I'm completely alone. We have no family here to watch Katie, so when I go to the hospital, it's just me. I drive myself and check in and go through all the tests. Brian visits on occasion when he can get away from work or he brings Katie for 20 minutes or so, but it's just me alone in a hospital room for 22 hours a day or so. It's a very bad situation.

The hardest part about all of this preterm labor has been having Katie around and not having any family here in town. I go to most of my doctor's appointments alone because Katie can't handle the wait (typically they are about an hour long). I sit on the monitors alone. I get the ultrasounds alone. I go to the hospital alone. I feel like I do a lot of this all by myself and it's very hard. I can't blame Brian because someone needs to be with Katie, but I wish I had some family here somewhere who could help out. We do have very good friends who offer to take her and a wonderful daycare provider who keeps her well into the evening when need be, but when I get checked in for more than a day, Brian still has to find a way to juggle everything. All of this is scary enough without having to be on my own while I do it all.

In any case, I'm still very hopeful that I will be allowed to move around a bit as of Tuesday. We're keeping our fingers crossed. Right now, I'm hoping to get a bit of sleep between now and then to help keep a bit of my sanity as well ;)