Oh, What a Night

As I've gotten further along in my pregnancy, things haven't been so easy breezy as it was earlier.  Nothing major, but I've had lots of aches and pains as my body has continued to grow and grow.  The weirdest thing recently is that I've had numbness in my lower belly/pelvic area.  My doctor said this is quite normal and all it means is that I'm growing and that my nerves are being stretched.  Fun, huh?

Well, last Thursday I woke up to severe pain in my ribs.  I had had rib pain earlier in my pregnancy that I attributed to growing pains, but this was not in my rib cage above the belly; this was pain in my side, almost under my arm.  Again, I chocked this up to growing pains because yes, I am still getting bigger. As the days went on, this pain continued to be severe and felt like it was getting worse.  I wondered if the growth had broken a rib.  I could not recall for the life of me, what I could have done.  Did I fall?  Did I run into something?  It was so weird.

On Thursday we decided to bring over some dinner to our friends who had just had a baby.  (Remember that picture I posted on Sunday of my super-pregnant friend and me?  Yeah, she had her baby earlier Tuesday morning.)  While Dave was finishing up work, I went to the grocery store to pick up the few things I still needed for dinner.  I literally had a package of chicken breasts, some sour cream, two avocado, and a bottle of laundry detergent.  I carried the bags in one hand and the detergent in the other.  While walking out of the grocery store, I felt everything rip and pull underneath my arm, in my ribs.  I barely made it out to my car without dropping everything.

I got home and put a heating pad on it.  I probably should have used ice, but I had been using ice all week long and it hadn't done anything.  I was in excruciating pain.  I couldn't even breathe.  I was kinda freakin' out.  I didn't want to disappoint our friends and I definitely wanted to meet the new baby, so I popped a Tylenol and went about my evening.

Side note, I have tried to not take ANYTHING during my pregnancy.  I know Tylenol is perfectly safe, I have just preferred not to take anything.  This was only my second Tylenol I've taken the entire 7-1/2 months.

The Tylenol only lessened the pain and it was only for about two hours.  By the time I went to bed, the pain was almost unbearable.  I was in so much pain I couldn't even cry.  Maybe because I couldn't breathe?  I was able to get about an hour of sleep before my bladder woke me up and that was that.  I couldn't get out of bed because of the pain, so when I did finally sit up it was like all my muscles on my left side had been ripped open.  I sat on the couch and tried to find comfort.  Any comfort.  Unfortunately, it wasn't happening.  My high risk doctor had told me that if anything seemed "off" after my 28th week, to go to the hospital and get monitored.  It was time.

At 2:00am, I woke Dave up and told him I couldn't handle the pain and that I wanted to go to the hospital and have the baby monitored.  Dave is a complete zombie when he sleeps.  I couldn't tell if he was just tired or if he was pushing back, but he didn't seem very happy to be going to the hospital at this hour.

We were in the ER by 2:30am and they immediately wheeled us up to Labor and Delivery.  I really didn't want to be in L&D.  I wasn't in labor.  I wanted something to be done about the pain I was in for my ribs.  Up in L&D, I felt like a big fat failure.  The first question they asked me was, "did I have a pediatrician."  No.  Not yet.  That's on the to-do list this month.  Second question, "have I pre-registered at the hospital."  Again, no.  We start our maternity classes at the end of the month which includes getting pre-registered.  I wasn't having a baby, but boy were they making me nervous.  They wheeled me into a room and made me strip down to absolutely nothing.  I knew exactly what this meant - there would be an internal exam.  Gah!  They hooked me up to two monitors: one to measure the baby's heart beat, and one to measure if I was having any contractions.  Not even five minutes after being all hooked up, I had to go to the bath room.  Of course.

They monitored me for about an hour before anyone came back in.  To everyone's surprise, I was having contractions.  Not Braxton Hicks contractions, but real contractions every few minutes.  They weren't strong and they didn't hurt but I could feel them only in the sense that my belly was tightening.  The doctor said I was only feeling those because I was tiny/thin.

They did do an internal exam and my cervix was closed and hard.  Thank goodness.  Then he checked out my ribs.  Oh my stars!  He hurt me so badly that I grabbed his arm and almost ripped out of the hair on it.  The resident on-call decided to call the doctor on-call at the OBGYN office I go to and come up with a plan.  I guess my doctor was the one on-call because he spoke directly to her.  They decided it was safe to give me a single dose of Norco and they would do a blood work-up and check my urine.  The nurse hooked me up with the full tubing in case I needed an IV later just to take my blood.  Yeah, that didn't feel good.  They gave me my dose of Norco and it made me feel very loopy and tired.

After four hours in L&D, they decided to send me home.  They gave me instructions to continue with Tylenol and using a heating pad.  They marked me down as having pre-term labor and just told me to keep my next appointment with my doctor.  They told me I could keep up with my activity level as long as I was feeling okay.

We got home at 7:00am and slept for the next several hours.  Tell you what, this has put quite a scare in us that the baby is coming early (of course, I'm now going to be two weeks late).  Now we've got to get our sh!t together really quickly.