Waiting for you. Patiently. Weeks 25, 26 & 27.

I’m home now.

They sprung me last night when one of my doctors, another high-risk Maternal Fetal Medicine (MFM doctor) decided to do another Fetal Fibronectin (fFN) test. “Let’s just see,” he said. He was curious if my last test could have been a false positive. I was curious too because you know, I just had this feeling. I don’t know what it was. Something about the look on the resident’s face as he wielded the swab. I didn’t quite trust it.

Last night at around 6:30 the new fFN test came back negative, which is a 98% insurance policy against preterm labor in the next 7-14 days.

“Pack up – you’re going home,” they said. I so wasn’t expecting that. Luckily Alex had just brought me sweat pants or I would have been leaving the hospital in my bird jammies. But I would have left just the same.

Monday night I started a different medication called Indomethacin. It’s sort of like strong Advil. You can only use it for about 48 hours or else you start to have risks for the babies, but this medication actually seems to work – a lot better than Procardia. And I haven’t had any side effects from it. So my contractions stopped. Two hours at different times of day, on the monitor, with nada, zip, nothing from my cranky uterus.

“Have you been feeling any contractions?” they asked.

See, here’s where it starts to get frustrating. What I thought I’d been feeling as contractions were often not picked up in monitoring. Or, I’d feel nothing at all, and they’d tell me they’d picked a few contractions up. So now I don’t really know what I’m feeling. That doesn’t help.

My plan? Do NOT to over think this. Last time my body was acting in a troubling way I knew it and I called the doctor. This is me, trying to learn to trust my intuition – something I’m normally really bad at. But I think my intuition has been pretty spot on during this pregnancy. So I’m not going to obsess over every little twitch. Not with a 98% assurance that things are okay for now.

So, this was quite the tricky pregnancy diary update. I tried starting it a number of times in the hospital and as you can see it’s a late getting here. Not that I couldn’t blog, mind you. But blogging specifically about the boys’ development and my wait for labor was so close to the epicenter of my fear for the last several days, it wasn’t a real go-to blogging topic.

But we’re alright now.

And hey guess what? I’ve been calculating my weeks wrong, so when I was writing these updates all along I thought I was a week behind where I was. As of today we have finished 27 weeks worth of gestation. That means last week was week 27 and now we are crawling to that magical 28 number – the point in time when 90% of babies born prematurely survive. This is key given the last couple of weeks.

Here’s the package as of last night:

Funny, for a month’s worth of growth it doesn’t seem so dramatically bigger than week 23, does it? But it is bigger, that I can tell you. And so are they.

In the past couple of weeks, the boys have:

• grown to about just over 2 lbs each, according to our last ultrasound on 11/20. Not too bad for twins, if I do say so myself.
• been flipping around in there like two-pounder circus fish, if there was such a thing as circus fish (there isn’t, right?)
• fully developed hands, which I am certain they’re using to spar with each other in utero
• fingerprints and foot prints
• begun to recognize my voice. Too bad it’s not giving them something more compelling to listen to besides “Alex?!?! Can you ________ ? (get me some water, let the dog out, throw this in the laundry, etc, etc, etc.“

And what’s important to note, according to Mayo, if babies are born at 27 weeks they have about an 85% survival rate. I don’t like to think morbidly but after 5 days in the hospital worried about such possibilities, I couldn’t escape it. So there it is.

As for me, well you probably know all that’s needed about the last few weeks from the previous few entries, but I’ll share some belated wisdom:

• I KNEW I should have been out of work earlier. I knew it because of my back pain, which I bitched about endlessly here from week 21 on. I really thought the degree of pain I was having was not right, and I am kicking myself that I wasn’t more assertive about going out of work sooner. On the weekends when I could lay down every time I started to feel uncomfortable I had little back pain. Every day I had to stand or sit for longer than an hour I had problems. The contractions both times started the day after I’d been to work. I explained this to one of the doctors after the first hospitalization, but still she said, “Let’s put you out at 28 or 30 weeks.” I should have said, “Uh, no dear, I know how I feel and I’m not going back.” Let that be a lesson to me. Especially since work didn’t care one iota about me coming back.
• I didn’t mention it, but I am on strict bedrest now. And after less than 24 hours of being home, I’m staring at the walls of my bedroom going, “Damn, this room needs to be painted.” Nesting instincts are a piss poor match for strict bedrest. I can get up to go to the bathroom, take a quick shower and downstairs once a day. Not going to get a lot of nesting done in this context. “Alex, can you please paint the bedroom?” No, seriously, he’s got enough to do.

Thanksgiving will now be here. Everyone wants to visit, which is really nice. But I will be horizontal and Alex will be frantically putting the house in order today to receive said guests on short notice. I am not sure but I think he gets the raw end of the bedrest deal. I think a nice invite for him out somewhere tomorrow with a plate of leftovers for me might have worked a little better, but oh well. Thank god he’s a good sport and has a better sense of humor.

And anyway, I’m still totally psyched for turkey, and all the more so with my dog at my feet drooling at the chance for dropped crumbs. (Okay I admit, not all of them are accidental.) But I’ll have to work on Alex to get the whole “afternoon tea” thing down.