Today my cousins came up from San Antonio to see me and my mom and we went to the mall. Spent a lot of money at the Disney store! But I had been needing to go anyway, to get some stuff. I was very careful through all of this; I didn’t even drive, and at the mall we got a wheelchair for me from customer service, so I wasn’t even walking there.
This afternoon I started having pains in my lower back. I thought they were gas pains, that’s exactly what it felt like. I felt pretty miserable from it, it hurt, but I just figured I needed to pass gas and I would be okay. So we went out to dinner again after the mall. By the end of dinner, I was really miserable, and the pains seemed to be starting to radiate towards my front. So when we got home I laid down and started timing the pains. The pains were coming every seven minutes, and gas pains don’t do that! I drank a ton of water, but it didn’t help. We called the doctor and went in to the hospital.
By the time we got to the hospital I was pretty sure it was contractions, and it hurt terribly. I couldn’t figure out what was going on, though, because most of the time I didn’t feel anything in my cervix, and I have always been able to feel the stitches pulling before. Just before we went to the hospital, I noticed that my pants were really wet, and I was a little scared that my water had already broken. They tested for that at the hospital, though, and they said no, that it must just be increased discharge or something. They have these little strips of paper, like litmus paper, and it only turns color in amniotic fluid. So when the nurse stuck one of those in between my legs and it didn’t change color, they said my water hadn’t broken.
They put me on a monitor, but it wasn’t picking up the contractions well at all. And whenever a nurse was feeling my belly when I had a contraction, she said they weren’t very strong. My doctor wasn’t on call that night, it was another one, and he never came up. They decided to send me back home. I asked if they were going to check my cervix first, and the nurse said not because it would just irritate my cervix and make things worse. So they didn’t even look. No drugs, not even a fluid drip. They just gave me a Seconal to make me sleep and sent me home.