*Look, early labor is not always very glamorous, so just to give you a heads up - I will be briefly describing things like bloody show and mucus plugs in this post. Nothing too gory, but you’ve been warned nonetheless. It's all part of the package.
Just for the record, I was okay with pretending that this baby might not come for a while. Even though every part of my body was telling me to keep my bags packed for the hospital, I knew that if I fed into the excitement, even only a few days of impatience would end up eating me alive. Then, the doctor actually confirmed my insanity. On Wednesday he officially deemed this baby ready to be born… and he gave me the green light to go bananas with all of the excitement I’d been bottling up for the past week and a half.
I had my membranes stripped, and as soon as I got home, had my bloody show. A big disgusting glop of bloody snot fell out of me. After gagging a little, I eagerly picked up the What to Expect book that’s been planted next to the toilet for the past nine months and learned that labor should theoretically start within 24-48 hours, although occasionally it can take up to a day or two beyond that. SWEET.
The next morning was uneventful, but I was still in pretty good spirits, knowing that things were on a roll that wasn’t going to stop now. About mid-afternoon I went to the bathroom and in looking down at one great big unmistakable blob of mucus, I got another hands-on lesson in the physiology of early labor that I’d spent so much of my life reading about in all of those pregnancy books. The Mucus plug. A lot of women, the book warns, can pass this without knowing it as they might lose it gradually over a period of time. Not me. This cervix was clearly uncorked in one fowl swoop of the tp. Then, just for good measure and a dose of confirmation, the rest of it came out in my next trip to the potty.
*This meant that the first stage of labor (dilation) had begun on it’s own
*The baby’s head was about as far down as it could possibly be at this point
*My membranes had been stripped - so labor had even been given an extra jump-start of induction
*I was already dilated to a “good” 3 centimeters
*And now, with the presence of my bloody show and the loss of my mucus plug out of the way, dilation and effacement were continuing enough to allow for their passage.
SO BASICALLY every single bullet point in every single pregnancy book that I own (and I own a good few) has been checked off, except for those damned contractions - which brings me to last night.
Needless to say, they started… and they started hard. Seven minutes apart, coming on strong right from the start. I interrupted Spencer’s shower to tell him that it was happening. Yeah - normally I would have waited it out a bit longer, chalking it up to a good probability of false labor, but this time was different. The doctor said that he’d see me in a couple of days, all of the other signs were there. Surely, if contractions started this time, I had all the other bullets on my side to back me up here! My membranes being stripped… All of that nasty crap I keep finding in the toilet… SURELY these factors have some bearing on being able to push me over the edge. I gave Spencer the heads up and warned him that even if he planned to still go into work the next day (which I’d let him do if he really wanted as long as the baby wasn’t crowning) that I’d be waking him up if I needed to. I did my best to fall asleep, planning to be woken up by stronger contractions sometime in another few hours.
Instead I wake up to the 4:00 a.m. alarm. Two contractions before breakfast was done and nothing… not a single cramp to speak of, after that. They say that every woman reaches a point in her pregnancy when she convinces herself that she will be the first woman on earth to never give birth. I’ve pretty much reached that point.
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