Cervical adventures at 33 weekish

So going by the mantra that nothing is ever boring in my life, I started to feel more cervical tingling/pain/movement Friday night, and just because I think that I'm crazy and paranoid, I scrub like a surgeon, and figure out the geometrics of getting my hand up my vagina to feel my cervix and figure out what the hell is going on. After TTC for the last 10 years or so, I'm an expert at figuring out the state of it quite easily and even discretely, but at 8 months pregnant, I look like a cross between a fetish film porn star and a Cirque Du Soleil gymnast.

Eventually I figure out how to grow my arms longer and find it, and it feels mushier than it did before, and I can even get a fingertip in a bit.

So freakin' panic sets in. I warn my husband to put his glass of wine down and be prepared to drive. (He's been dreading this part of the pregnancy since it means he can't drink more than a drop. So far I've been his designated driver, but now it may be time to switch, haha, since I can barely fit behind the wheel anymore and I need him to be able to make decisions without falling down even if it IS a special night with clients, yadda, yadda bullshit.)

Anyway, shortly afterwards the weird feeling stops completely and I decided to try and sleep and think about something else.

At 7 am I wake up with cramps, not contractions, but a crampy kind of pain, very low. I get my husband awake, and talk to him about going to the hospital. His first question? "Can we wait until after the kids' swim lesson?" upon which I promptly burst into tears. I mean, HELLO? I held off until morning for pete's sake. I think he clued in right then that we weren't waiting until after swimming.

So his cousin took the kids to swimming and we drove off to labour & delivery triage and we walked up there hand in hand, super tense, but at least together. We found the nurse, gave her the skinny, and she promptly hooked me up to the monitors and went for a Doctor. She didn't have any of my history, since my records hadn't been transferred over yet, so I had to recite it all, and the pages I'd written up were waaayyyy too long. (I've decided to edit that to one page or less--previous pg history, this pregnancy history, current meds, and any current medical conditions. Even after my records are transferred, my doc has the world's worst handwriting and I'm not sure what anyone will make of that scribble, meanwhile I can type some acronyms legibly, right?)

Turns out that the twelve year old resident doesn't think my cervix is shorter, but since her arm isn't an ultrasound machine she can't be sure, and my last measurement was 3-3.5 cm and meanwhile I'm wondering what the reason is for the pain if it isn't pre-term labour, but she has no clue and no answers. Nurses at the hospital are Goddesses by the way....I seriously worship them.

Nice part? We get to leave for one reason and one reason only, simply because I had already had the steroid shots (Celestone) to mature the baby's lungs at 25 weeks. And therefore, she has no concerns about the pain...in fact, I'm fine and can just come back if it gets worse. I'm finding this to be ironic since my Doc was not concerned about me getting it. He wrote the prescription and it was only $40 to fill, and covered by my insurance, and the shots turned out to be not so painful after all----so why don't more women get them? Not everyone obviously, but hey, if there are no side effects and it saves preemie lives and money, well, I'm wondering why they don't give them to anyone with even a teeny complication? Plus, the province just saved some money because I didn't have to be admitted over the weekend for 48 hours. Short-sighted health care system in my opinion.

Oh yeah, I forgot, they only try to prevent BIG diseases like cancer, fuck maternal-fetal-infant health. Cheap, and easy to fix and makes good photo-ops, never mind the moral implications, but instead they just run around throwing money at hospital presidents and VPs and other wasteful administrative crap. Actual direct patient care? A distant second as long as we fund hospitals on a lump sum basis.....

Yes, I'm happy the baby is fine, the most important thing, but I'm mentioning politics for a reason by the way---my friend Warren had a post today where he again tried to say that there are too few women in the Canadian blogosphere---meanwhile I read close to a hundred female Canadian bloggers. Man must not look very hard. Blind as a bat in fact. Go give him your opinion if you feel like it!

Meanwhile the last few days, I've been sorting old baby clothes by size and figuring out what needs to be washed and what needs to be tossed, and today I went shopping for furniture and stuff. I've already checked out one store, but this time I did some serious looking at cribs, etc at Moms to be...and More . And of course, anything decent quality takes weeks to arrive and I'm late because I didn't want to order anything to early. I'm sorry but even the most optimistic naive person can't really order baby furniture 16 weeks early, can they? I finally found one company that can get me stuff in 6-8 weeks. And it's Canadian! And they use real wood instead of glue and cardboard and shit!

College Woodwork is apparently in Oshawa, and makes some nice stuff from what I've seen...we'll see how it looks once I pick something. Yeah, I could go for the glue and cardboard stuff at Ikea again, but that stuff breaks so easily, I have to confess, I've pretty sick of it. Twenty years of crappy furniture; I'm ready to upgrade to something not made of chemicals and sawdust, thanks.

Anyway, I've suddenly realized that all this setting up the room & shopping is giving me some more Braxton-Hicks, which are painful, and therefore may actually be contractions and the irony is that I cannot type while in pain, in fact, I had planned on live blogging my labour, but I don't know if this will work so well now. Very distracted, maybe that's why it has taken 4 days to write this post.

My last thing of note. I heard this quote on the West Wing just this past couple of days and thought it might explain a few things in my life. Any of the other dead baby mamas reading agree? In fact, this scene might explain my entire personality.....

Josh and Leo are talking on the phone about a problem and a rescue plan Josh wants to implement to save Leo from political disaster.

Leo: "Cause you're walking around with so much guilt about everybody you love dying that you're a compulsive fixer?"

Josh: "No Leo, no, it's because there's this guy walking down the street and he falls in a hole...."

Dudes, I would never have made it through this pregnancy without you all. I thought I was supposed to be fixing you, and then, you fixed me right back.