False Labor

I'm hoping that the title of this post makes it very clear that the events that I'm about to relay have not resulted in the birth of a baby. Just want to put that out there before you continue reading so that nobody gets too excited . . . Also, upon re-reading it, I think I should also take a moment now to reassure you, the reader, that the baby and I are fine.

On Friday morning, I woke up at 2:30am with some painful contractions. This isn't too unusual for me. I tried the usual tactics -- emptying my bladder, lying on my left side, drinking water, pooping, taking a shower, etc. Nothing was helping. I started timing them and they were fairly irregular -- most of them coming every 3-6 minutes, but a few were more like 6-9 minutes apart and some were as close as 2.5 minutes apart. Most of them were lasting about a minute. If they had felt more intense and been more regular, then the alarm of "5-1-1! 5 minutes or less apart! Lasting 1 minute! For one hour!" would have been going off in my head. But although they were painful and I had to stop and breathe to get through them, they just didn't feel like real labor to me.

Eventually, around 6am, I stopped timing them and decided to try to just get some rest. They were spacing out a bit by then, and so I figured this was my chance to see if I could sleep them off. I wrote a note to Ben to update him on what was going on and then got back in bed. I dozed a bit between contractions, but didn't really sleep much.

They weren't stopping. At 9am, Ben and I dropped Greta off at her drop-in daycare. As he went to take her inside, I gave her a kiss on the cheek and then, as I watched them walk off, I started crying, wondering if this was the last time I'd see her before she became a big sister.

We came back home and I sat on the yoga ball while Ben packed our bags for the hospital -- a task which we'd prepared for, but not yet actually accomplished (it had been on my to-do list for that day while Greta was at drop-in daycare). When we were done, I tried to distract myself for awhile and began to notice that the contractions were slowing to about 7-13 minutes apart. I felt fairly confident that things were chilling out.

By about 1pm, though, they were back to 2-5 minutes apart, and more intense. Ben arranged for his parents to pick up Greta from drop-in daycare and left for a nearby meeting. I called the midwife on call to check in and ask what she'd recommend. She asked whether my water had broken or if I'd had any bleeding. No. She asked what my GBS status was. Negative. She asked if I had been dilated at my last appointment and I sheepishly admitted that I had declined to be checked. She asked if I could talk through my contractions and, as I had one, I breathlessly said that I could, but that I didn't enjoy it. She said I sounded like I was in labor, warned me that second labors can be very different from first labors (I had protested that I hadn't had any bloody show or mucus plug loss), and reminded me that now might be a good time to come to the hospital because during the middle of the day we wouldn't have to worry about highway rush hour traffic. But my contractions still felt really manageable and lying down in my own bed was where I wanted to be. I said that I would try to stick it out at home for a little while longer and see what happened and she said that if I decided to come in, I should just call and have them page her that I was on my way rather than waiting for a call-back.

Ben and I chatted about it a few times. I now was convinced that this was the real deal. With each contraction, I could feel that my breathing was changing about 5 seconds before the actual contraction hit, it was rising to a peak that I could feel externally on my abdomen and that radiated down into my legs, and then gradually fading away after about a minute. Between Greta's pregnancy and this one, I had had plenty of contractions that didn't result in any cervical changes or baby births -- these ones felt legit.

But I still didn't want to be at the hospital yet. I wasn't panicked enough. I wasn't experiencing enough outward signs of labor. Heck, I was only 37 weeks --  the baby hadn't even dropped yet! It just didn't seem plausible that my baby was ready to be born.

This is the problem with having a first labor that has such a distinct starting point. With Greta, I had bloody mucus and almost immediately I was having time-able contractions. So when I couldn't sleep through them anymore and woke up in blinding pain, it felt reasonable to assume that I was in labor. This was so different. It felt like what I expect early labor to feel like, but the timing was more closely matched to active labor. I didn't want to be at the hospital if I was in early labor, but I didn't want to be at home if I was about to hit transition and give birth.

We operated off of instincts, which were telling us that this was the real deal, but that it might be awhile still and that we'd wait for things to get more intense before making the call to go to the hospital. The midwife called me back at 5:30pm towards the end of her on-call shift to check in and I asked whether I should keep trying to rest and lie down, or whether I should be up and moving around to get things progressing. She told me to do whatever felt best -- and that if I could rest, that was a good thing.

By around 8pm, things were slowing down again. The contractions were still coming about as frequently, but feeling even more manageable as far as intensity, and seemed to be shortening up to about 40 seconds instead of a minute in duration. I was feeling exhausted, so I took my usual half-tab of Unisom and tried going to sleep around 9pm.

In the night, I woke up and noticed that my contractions were gone. Completely gone. In fact, my uterus felt more relaxed than it had in months. I felt a flood of emotions -- relief that the pains had stopped; sadness that I wouldn't be meeting my baby soon; confusion as to what all that had been for! Having had so many contractions, it was eerie to not have any.

I woke again at 3:30 and went to use the restroom. Not a single contraction -- not even when I was sitting on the toilet (a position which often causes contractions for me during the third trimester). I tried to go back to sleep, but couldn't and so I ended up going downstairs and eating a bowl of cereal.

As I sat at the dining table with my cereal, I shook my head, thinking how bizarre it felt to go from 60 to zero. To go to sleep with contractions 3 minutes apart and wake up with none. I rubbed my belly and thought about how calm my uterus felt. That I didn't even feel pregnant.

Then I froze. I didn't even feel pregnant. I realized that I hadn't felt a single movement from the baby since waking up, despite the fact that 3am-5am is usually a busy time for her. I started panicking and crying as I poured myself a tall glass of ice and apple juice and downed it. I lay down on my left side and turned on my kick count app. Within a couple minutes, I got two tiny movements, which was very relieving -- but they were tiny little flickers and not like her usual morning kicks. I started periodically poking my belly, shaking it this way and that. Lately, it has felt like every time I even lightly touched my belly, she'd roll around and move. Not now, though. Shaking my belly and poking and prodding did nothing. While I eventually got to 10 movements, it took awhile and I could barely stay awake to record the tenth movement. I fell back asleep, still a little worried.

When I woke again a few hours later, though, I still was feeling barely any movements. I was starting to panic. Only baby knows when she's ready, is a common phrase amongst childbirth experts. There is increasing evidence that there's something in the baby's brain -- rather than the mother's body -- which triggers the start of labor. Here my baby had been trying to get me into labor for 17 hours without success . . . and now she wasn't moving. Was something wrong? Was she in danger and needed to get out?

I called the midwife who was currently on-call and explained that my contractions had stopped, but that I now was worried about a decrease in fetal movement. She asked a few questions and then had me come in to be monitored.

The ride to the hospital was so long. Resting my hands on my motionless belly, I felt more scared than I ever have before. The hormonal drop from the previous day's excitement mixed with flashbacks to emptiness I felt on the day that we lost Sparkie. I found myself crying. I don't even feel pregnant. My own words kept ringing in my ears.

They hooked me up to the monitors at the hospital and began tracking the baby's heartbeat. The heartbeat wasn't all that reassuring -- after all, I knew that she had a heartbeat because I had felt a handful of movements. What worried me more was that she wasn't moving as much, and she wasn't responding to external stimuli (food, cold drinks, me poking at her) the way she normally did. I was worried that something was wrong and that she was in danger.

The midwife, nurse, and student midwife explained that the limited movements that I was feeling were correlated with excellent heart accelerations and that her heartbeat sounded "perfect." What's more, even when I couldn't feel the movement, they could tell that she was moving fairly frequently by the other sounds that the heartbeat monitor was picking up. I wanted to see her and see that everything was okay, but they don't send you for an ultrasound when they can confirm that everything's okay with the other monitors. So after some more anxious crying and the reassurance of a few more kicks-associated-with-accelerations, we headed out.

For what it's worth, she's been moving more normally since then. Things are looking good for both of us. I'm a complete emotional mess, but that's just par for the course with me.

The take-home message? False labor is insane. It is a total head trip. I had heard of it, of course. I knew it was possible to have contractions that really do feel just like real labor without being in labor. I had heard of people arriving at the hospital, only to be sent home. But after my experience with Greta -- in which I had had plenty of contractions, but felt distinctly different when it was "the real thing" -- I had thought for sure that I would know the difference. Now I don't know what to think. Yesterday I felt progressively more convinced that there was no turning back, that no matter how long it took, I was on my way to having a baby. Today, I have no fecking clue. Is labor going to pick up again in a couple days? In a couple weeks? Will I go overdue?

Although I had intended to decline pre-labor cervical checks unless I went overdue, I am now wondering whether I should get myself checked out at my next appointment -- if only to satisfy my curiosity and to make it easier to answer the, "And what were the results of your most recent cervical check?" question by midwives and nurses. As much as I know that it's my right to decide whether to get checked, I felt bad for not having an answer to a routine question.

On the other hand, if I am still not dilated at all, I will feel angry at my body for not knowing how to properly dilate a cervix. I will feel like my 17 hours of "labor" are all for nought.

Except that we got those bags packed. That is definitely worth something.