Liliana's Story, Part II

Missed part one?  Read it here.

Names of all midwives and nurses have been reduced to initials for privacy purposes.  If I get a chance to ask them for permission, names may be entered at a later date.

______________

Fast forward 4 days. It’s Tuesday morning; Ish is about to leave for work and I realize that I am leaking fluid. A million and one thoughts are racing through my mind: “Did my water break? Which way is the baby facing? Do I call the birth center or the new midwife? What am I supposed to do with Little Ish?” Ish and I have a frenzied conversation while Little Ish throws a full out temper tantrum. Decisions are made.

Ish calls his mom to ask her to take Little Ish. Fail. She is driving Ish’s sister Emily to the airport. Em to the rescue! She calls her husband and he is going to come hang out with the Little guy.

Little Ish goes down for a nap aka stands in his crib screaming for a while and doesn’t fall asleep. I am pretty sure he senses that something is wrong.

Since I am not having contractions at this point, Ish leaves for work. I contact the birth center and wait for the midwife on call to be paged. The five minutes it takes to get the return phone call feels like hours. The phone rings. I hastily explain my situation to D and she says that she thinks she can safely have me come get checked. I call Ish and he comes home immediately.

Ish brings the little guy outside to play until Scott arrives. I’m not even sure if I said “hi” or “thank you” before we rushed out the door (note: it’s always nice to have an experienced parent watching your child--need for instructions is minimal). The car ride was a blur. We arrived at the birth center and had to wait a few minutes to go back--the laundry room had flooded so D needed a moment to clean up.

We made our way to the exam room, and D explains the procedure for checking whether or not my water had broken. I still remember the details from our false alarm with Little Ish, but I don’t bother stopping her. Before collecting the specimen to verify the possible rupture of membranes, D listens to the baby’s heart rate on the doppler. She is finding the heart rate really low on my belly and says, “Wouldn’t it be really cool if your water hadn’t broken and baby was head down?” D feels for the baby’s head from the outside and is thinking that she may have finally flipped head down. We agree that an internal is necessary.

D does everything necessary to check if my water had broken. She is pretty sure I am in the clear, but she needs to wait for the slide she made to dry [under a microscope amniotic fluid appears as a very distinctive pattern]. Afterward, I have the longest internal ever, but D is 99.9% sure that the baby has flipped. We decide an ultrasound to verify would be a good precaution. I decide not to get my hopes up.

After all is said and done, I have my weekly NST while I wait for D to look at the slide. The baby is not doing very much, and I am due for a snack [gestational diabetics have to eat every few hours to maintain normal glucose levels]. I was in such a rush to get to the birth center that I hadn’t thought to bring anything--midwives to the rescue! D raids the birth center fridge and makes me toast. I couldn’t decide between hummus or peanut butter so I eat half a slice with one topping and half with the other. Once I have eaten and switched positions the baby is performing like a pro for the monitor.

D comes in to check on me with some “bad” news. The results of the slide are inconclusive. We go through the whole specimen collection process again. Instead of having us wait around for results, D offers to call if my water has indeed broken. This works out well because Ish spent the time I was on the monitors making me an appointment for an ultrasound. The appointment is in less than 2 hours.

The location of the ultrasound place is right near one of our favorite lunch spots. We have plenty of time to grab lunch before my appointment. One bowl of Thai chicken soup later, I am off to get an ultrasound. The ultrasound tech isn’t supposed to tell patients much, but this one is really nice and immediately verifies that the baby is head down. That is all that we needed to know but she does a full work up of the baby anyways.

As we leave the imaging center I feel so much less stressed knowing that baby is planning on diving out instead of attempting a cannon ball birth. The icing on the cake? My membranes hadn’t ruptured. Little did I know how much stress this wonderful news could cause.

___________________

To be continued...