So our anniversary weekend is always pretty awesome because it falls on the weekend of the 4th, which means we get a day off work, cookouts, and fireworks. This weekend for us started out pretty great. We went out to eat at one of my favorite restaurants, where I gave the poor waiter a run for his money asking about how well they cook their scallops and whether or not Skate Wing is a predator fish. Once we got things worked out the meal was phenomenal. Shortly before we left for dinner, however, Matt instructed me to pack an overnight bag. I was totally blindsided, as I am not easily surprised, but giddily complied. It turns out he had arranged (with the help of some friends) for us to stay the night at a lovely downtown hotel. It was fantastic to get “away” for about 12 hours. The next day I went to an early showing of Eclipse with a friend and had a solid swim at the University. It was a great start to what I was planning on being a fantastic weekend.

Well. I woke up Sunday morning feeling a little off, just kind of crampy and uncomfortable. I figured it would pass with some breakfast and a walk. After church I felt pretty bad so I decided to have a real rest. It didn’t help and I spent the next several hours groaning on the couch. Most of you are probably thinking why did you wait so long to do something!? The truth is it really just felt like bad gas cramps, except nothing was uhhh, passing. I tried walking, every conceivable laying position, drinking tea, sitting on the toilet. Matt was getting concerned so I went ahead and called the OB on call. She didn’t seem terribly interested, told me to call back in a few hours if I saw no improvement. I still felt lots of kicking, so I really wasn’t worried myself. With no change I called her back around 7pm and she instructed me to just go to the hospital. Ugh. All I could think about was how pointless this was and how expensive it would be.

It was a little weird being in the L&D department of the hospital where we were told we wouldn’t be able to conceive. I felt a little victorious, actually. Take that, suckers! But anyway, we got checked in fairly quickly and I got hooked up to the monitoring machines. The baby’s heart rate was good and I didn’t appear to be having any contractions. The nurse left and told me the doctor would be in shortly.

We waited, and waited, and watched the World Cup, and waited. They had me laying on my back (ummm, I thought that was a no-no?), and I was just so uncomfortable. The room was tiny, the bed was uncomfortable, there was a fly buzzing around, the paint was peeling, and our room was right next to a hallway door badly in need of some WD-40. A nurse came in about after about an hour to give me my allergy bracelet and told me there was a delay due to an unexpected delivery next door. Ummm, aren’t they all a little unexpected? The only reason I agreed to go to the hospital in the first place is that I have no sense of what normal is anymore. I feel like I have lost touch with my body, it’s doing things it never did before, that working through pain is no longer a good idea, and how the hell am I supposed to know the difference between a contraction and a gas cramp?

We hit a turning point when my machines started beeping and an error message on the screen read “FHR=0″. Ok, I am no doctor, but I knew what that meant and I sort of lost it. I called the nurse, who took her time in arriving, and she just blew me off:

“It’s beeping because of your finger.”

“What does that mean?”

“Your pulse ox.”

“What does that mean?”

“It just can’t detect a signal.”

Oh Lord. She was basically telling me that the machine was not terribly accurate and that if I had actually been in my room dead, they would not have gotten any sort of error message at their station, or would have blown it off due to frequent mechanical failure. I asked when we might expect to see a doctor, as we were going on two hours with no pain improvement, she reminded me about the woman giving birth. Yeah, I got it.

I took all the machines off and rolled over on my side. Apparently the monitoring equipment was for my own amusement and I was no longer amused.

When I was finally seen, they felt my abdomen, checked my urine, and told me I was probably just “backed up”. I thought that rather unlikely, but hey, they’re the doctors, right? They gave me a script for some laxatives, and just as we were leaving, the doctor came back and and said, “you know what, we better check your cervix for preterm labor”.

Uhhhh, shouldn’t you have done that WHEN I FIRST GOT HERE!?

We stopped at Wendy’s on the way home and I got a huge, greasy, bowel-moving burger and fries. I guess I would feel good about this being a “false alarm” sort of incident except that when I got home last night the Wendy’s took effect and it didn’t really make me feel any better. I did, however, learn some valuable buzz words for getting taken seriously. Things like “preterm labor”, “pelvic pressure”, and “abdominal cramps”.

Oh yeah, and it’s pretty unlikely that the hospital birth I was planning on is going to happen.