False Labor

Monday morning I went in for my usual fetal monitoring and Vicky informed me that I was having contractions every 5 minutes!  I could feel some of them and others went unnoticed by me, but they registered clearly on the monitor strip.

She checked the baby and said she is taking the contractions well, so just hang tight and see how it goes.  Of course, she had the nurse practitioner check me out before I left and I had changed from 1 cm to 1.5 cm from Thursday before, and from 0% effaced to 50% effaced from the Thursday before.  I had to mentally get ready for delivery after hearing all that!  I was NOT ready to do this, and kept thinking to myself, "Not today.  Not today!!!!"

I went home, and finally packed a bag.  Then the contractions REALLY started in!!!  Marti had me start writing them down so we could time them and the 10:00 hour was probably the worst.  I could feel MANY contractions and had to remind myself to breathe through the pain.  It was fine though, and they started and stopped fairly quickly instead of piling one on the other like when I had Abby.  It was nice to get a break between contractions so I could recover a little!

As the day went on, I didn't want to be alone in case things picked up, so Marti sat with me and then my parents came over to stay with me.  They picked up Abby and brought me some food since I hadn't eaten and was feeling weak.  That thought scared me because I need strength to pull this off, but if I'm going to throw up, how am I going to eat?  It was a catch-22!  Luckily, Mom thought of cream of potato soup, and that hit the spot with no fall out!

Eventually, the contractions eased up and around 5pm, they were not nearly as severe and less frequent.  Up until then, I could probably count on at least 6 per hour, so about every 10 minutes all day long.

I went to bed around 11pm when they had pretty much stopped, and the next day was completely uneventful except that I had to go back to work!  It felt like I had gone through labor and SHOULD have delivered a baby, and then went to work the next day!  SO UNFAIR!!!  I joked that it felt like I had gotten mugged while running a marathon.  I was sore and exhausted!  I mean, how would you feel if someone spent about a minute punching you in the gut, EVERY ten minutes at least, for an entire day?  I was SPENT!