Labour & Delivery Trip

That's correct, I've been to the hospital and back (baby's still in there, folks). On Tuesday I had a doctor's appointment and leading up to actually going in to meet the doctor (he's a specialist for a secondary "complication"), baby was doing somersaults (raspberries, apparently) and was the most active s/he's been to date. Went in, had my appointment, came home. On Wednesday night, I realized that I hadn't really felt the baby move SINCE then. I did all the tips & tricks (eat, lie down, wait a while, try again). I did manage to get one boot out of the baby, but what little movement I was feeling was markedly weak in comparison to the prior two or three weeks' activities. Grae came home from his night out and I let him know the situation. Grae played the baby music and that was when we got the one boot from him/her. I really don't like going to hospitals, causing alarm, or needlessly freaking out, so I thought, "baby's just having a quiet day; we all have quiet days". The next morning I was unable to rouse the baby. What little movement I could feel was very easily from gravity (lying on one side, rolling to the other, and very limp movements inside). At 7am, I decided that I still shouldn't panic as there isn't a whole lot that can be done in the worst case scenario. I would wait it out and see if I would get any more movement in the morning. At 11am, I got tired of waiting and realized that there was no activity coming from inside. I was pretty upset at this point (which has, in the past, encouraged baby to boot me a bit), so I called the hospital. They took some information and told me to come in right away. I grabbed a quick shower, and Grae threw together a hospital bag in case baby was in trouble and had to come out (middle-of-the-road scenario). We grabbed a cab over to the hospital and baby finally moved, but again, weakly. We get checked in, and I'm hooked up to monitors. Baby's heartrate has been consistantly 160bpm in previous appointments, but the one on Tuesday and on the monitors was around 130-140bpm. Good news! It has a bpm that isn't BAD. Good news, he/she is still alive in there! It was a big weight off of our shoulders. Grae was wondering why we weren't being discharged after being hooked up after 15 minutes, and the really nice nurse came in to inform us that they were calling in my doctor and explained that there needed to be shifts in the heartbeat pattern (when there were none after about half an hour). She changed my position and the heartbeat patterns became irregular, dipping as low as 120bpm (still a reasonable rate), but also getting the highs of 160bpm. My blood pressure was good (high for me, but still safe) and I wasn't running a fever. My doctor showed up and we talked about the situation. Other than waiting a further 12 hours (coming in the night before), I did pretty much what I was supposed to do; attempt to rouse it with food, activity and rest and come in when the tricks don't work.

We got discharged (phew!) not long after and went to give baby some more raspberries (which got it up and partying again...).