Plugs and Contractions

This past thursday night, Angela thought she might have passed her mucus plug (for those of you who have no idea what that means, it is basically a wad of mucus that plugs the cervix to keep infection from reaching little mini-Spar). That normally doesn't happen so soon in the pregnancy, but the childbirth class we took told us it was no biggie, that we should call the doctor in the morning to tell them. So we did...they wanted to check her out to make sure she wasn't dilating. Her appointment was for 3pm on friday (she left work early to go to the appointment, I had to stay at work).

When 5pm rolled around and she hadn't returned to work, I began to wonder what was happening - I had a text message on my phone saying they had her on a monitor and she would be a while. Of course, I left straight away and went to the hospital to be with her. When I arrived, she was hooked up to 2 monitors (one to monitor her uterine contractions and one monitoring the baby's heart rate) - she had started having early contractions very regularly since arriving at the hospital. They wanted to put her on an IV to hydrate her to see if that would stop it - so after several attempts (she has awful veins) and me almost passing out from watching the attempts, they got a vein and pumped her up. No luck. They did some tests on her and found out that her cervix was closed (good news) and she was not actually in labor (very good news). However the contractions kept on coming every 3 minutes or so...by this time it was around 9pm.

They decided to give her a shot of some medicine (a smooth muscle relaxant) to stop the contractions. It did the trick...however it also dropped her blood pressure, and she nearly fainted. This, of course, happened while I was downstairs grabbing a sandwich. I came back up to find her on oxygen and shaking. Pleasant. She calmed down quickly...and the contractions started again. Oh, and her IV line blew too. So, they had another 5-6 attempts at replacing the IV (again, I nearly passed out), and were unsuccessful - so they had to call in "the IV team" which was an older lady who looked like a librarian on crack. She got a vein first try, and we were very thankful. They then gave her another shot of the medicine, and her contractions ceased and desisted. No more fainting spells (for either of us). We were discharged with a prescription for the same medicine she had been getting in shot form, to be taken every 4 hours, and she was directed to be on bed rest for the weekend. By now, it was around 1 am.

So....wife and baby are doing fine (baby has had no problem at all throughout the whole thing), she is still getting some tightening sensations here and there and is a bit shaky from the meds at times, but otherwise fine. I am sure she has been enjoying being waited on hand-and-foot by Jeeves (i.e. the butler/manslave...otherwise known as ME). The plan is for her to be re-evaluated tomorrow to see if she has to stay on bed rest for the remainder of the pregnancy or if she can move around more (I am assuming she won't be able to return to work, but we will see what the doctor says). Hopefully she can get off this medicine and get back to some sort of normalcy, as she HATES being confined to the bed. Keep your fingers crossed for us...

Oh, also, we got some new windows installed in the house. They look nice.