Comments on: Dry run: a story about preterm labor that wasn’t

By: Myg

Myg — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 15:20:09 +0000

Kim – thanks so much for telling me that. It makes me feel so much better to know that there are things they could do to stop your active labor – and for so long! How lucky you were, and how great for your kids. That’s a good point about keeping a copy of my chart because my god, I have to retell and retell and retell the entire medical history for every resident, fellow, attending, nurse, whoever stops by. I’m always like – do any of you ever bother to read my f’ing chart?

By: Replay

Replay — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 05:13:48 +0000

[...] started having more mild contractions again yesterday. Again, they weren’t painful. I just had a lot of them in a short period of time. [...]

By: kim

kim — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 22:44:26 +0000

I went into active labour with my twins at 25 weeks. I had contractions every two minutes and was four centimetres dialated for 11 weeks. They kept me in hospital on strict bedrest ( which was very hard but worth it) and in the end my babes made it all the way to 36 weeks. Born an incredibly healthy four and five pounds respectively. Keep an open dialogue up with your primary doctor, and make sure you have a copy of your chart with you at all times. This will make any emergency trips to the hospital a lot easier as the residents won’t need to hunt for your information. Keep your chin up, get a lot of rest, and remember to enjoy this last leg of your pregnancy. It’s no cake-walk, but it is an astonishingly amazing ride!

By: Myg

Myg — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 15:42:17 +0000

Thanks so much for all the well wishes and advice. If it seems like I’m good at advocating for myself I can only say it’s probably because I am a social worker who’s worked closely with a lot of different doctors in psychiatric hospitals, so I know as a rule doctors fuck up, er, I mean are more human than we realize. But even as I was writing this I was pretty anxious thinking about all the different things that almost went wrong – in a situation where luckily there wasn’t much wrong in the first place. I’m sure I’ll be even more hyper about every little decision next time. Lucky medical personnel!

By: outside voice

outside voice — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 04:33:59 +0000

I’m so glad this ended happily, and wow, you are so impressive how you (1) stand up for yourself and (2) process everything. Sending you all best wishes for the remaining weeks–may they be peaceful!

By: Stephanie

Stephanie — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 20:05:34 +0000

Hi, I’m Katie D.’s friend – she sent me a link to your blog. I just had twin girls three weeks ago and thought I’d say hi.

Like you, I ended up in the hospital a few times around 25-26 weeks for contractions. I didn’t have any cervical changes and my FFN was negative, so they basically gave me a shot of something that I forget the name of now to stop the contractions and told me not to come in again unless I had painful contractions. I ended up going to almost 35 weeks when I had to have a c-section due to pre-eclampsia.

Good luck with the rest of your pregnancy! Do everything you can to go as close to full term as possible – rest, eat well, etc. Our babies spent two weeks in the NICU and that was hard enough – I can’t imagine how horrible it would have been if they had been born earlier and would have had to spend a lot more time there.

Also, I highly recommend having the nursery and everything else ready as soon as possible. If the babies do come early, it makes a huge difference if everything is already setup and organized, so you can just get used to taking care of the babies and not worry about having diapers or a place for them to sleep.

By: Myg

Myg — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 00:21:26 +0000

Yeah and I had great medical care by any standard. It just goes to show, you’ve got to really be on top of it, which is hard when you’re so out of it and know so little about what’s going on. As for the donut – I was craving a glazed donut for a week. I made Alex bring me one the next morning in the hospital!

By: Tatiana

Tatiana — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 21:38:30 +0000

Wow chica, it is good that you were SO on top of everything. I tend to be very unassertive and assume that doctors know so much better than me that I ought not to question them, so this was a pretty shocking read for me. Time to take my head out of the clouds and be Straight-Shootin’ Mommy.

I’m so happy to hear that there’s no imminent “danger” of the boys coming out too early. And hey, they might have said no more sex, but I’d definitely blame the Burger King too!

As for myself, I’ve wanted a goddamn donut for days and I can’t get my husband to stop on his way home from work to pick one up for me. I think he thinks this pregnancy thing is so easy, like… big deal, my belly’s getting bigger, the hard part starts when the baby gets here. Either that or he doesn’t realize HOW BADLY I want that donut!