Practice Run

Steve & crew survived their hike in Sequoia over the weekend.  Meanwhile, I enjoyed a quiet weekend at home, and did a ton of laundry.  This morning, I got up super early to take a couple of people to the airport. 

However, as soon as I righted myself out of bed, I could feel liquid starting to gush down my legs.  I sprinted (as much as a 36 weeks preggo chick can sprint) to the bathroom, where I ended up with quite the puddle on the floor (and soaked PJ pants).

Uh oh.

What just happened?

Steve and I agreed that the amount of fluid seemed substantial for just urine, especially given that I had used the bathroom several times during the night.

Well, the on-call doc for my OB’s office said there was only one way to tell for certain whether it was amniotic fluid – head to the hospital and they’ll do a test.

After some shared wide-eyed panic moments, Steve & I packed up a bag and trucked off to the hospital.  I was a little surprised by all of this – I had another non-stress test on Monday at the OB’s office, and there was absolutely no drama going on (no contractions, and Kit’s heart rate was just fine), so it all seemed sort of out of the blue.

Being the completely inexperienced preggo chick, I was sure to caveat my response to the hospital worker queries – “I think my water broke.”  I was very careful to NOT definitively say I was certain about any of this.

So I got hooked up to the monitors, and the nurse did test for amniotic fluid.  Meanwhile, the contraction monitor started picking up some contractions, including a mega-long 9 minute contraction. 

That’s not normal.  Even though it didn’t really cause me any pain.  But Kit was not happy with that one – heart rate dipped down, which made the nurse & doctor not happy.  So I was stuck on the monitors for a while longer, to watch to see if anything crazy like that happened again.

Meanwhile, the amniotic fluid test came back negative.  Which means my whole bathroom incident this morning was the result of too much water the night before, coupled with a lot of compression on my bladder when I stood up this morning.

So that means I peed myself.  A lot.  Awesome.  I’m definitely winning at life.

Anywho, we got 2 more ultrasounds of Kit – the first to measure amniotic fluid, and the second was a bio-physical.  We actually got a peek of Kit’s cute little face (shy baby was actually face up for a bit), and an ear (which didn’t seem to be elfish, so perhaps Steve has not passed along that particular characteristic).

My contractions were irregular and not anywhere near as long as that first one they measured, and Kit didn’t seem to be reacting as strongly to them (less variability in the heart rate) – so we were sent home.

All in all?  Not too terrible for a practice run to the hospital.  And better to be safe than to be sorry.  Even though I feel pretty dumb.

However, I’m not at all convinced I’ll actually be able to determine if my water actually breaks.  I’ll probably chalk it up to pee (at least if it doesn’t keep coming).  I will, however, make sure I have an extra pair of pants & undies available at all times in case this scenario happens to repeat itself.