My Body is Trying to Tell Me Something

Yesterday, I hit 32 weeks.  As I've mentioned, I've had an exceedingly easy pregnancy up to this point.  This week? My body started telling me things. Like slow down. Like ease up.

It was a really busy week at work with our quarterly board meetings.  Normally, I get to work at 7:30 and can ease into the morning by checking my email and eating breakfast.  This week, it was go, go, go all day.  Suddenly, after a two hour -long meeting on Thursday, my energy level crashed, and I'd never felt more exhausted. I started seriously worrying about how am I going to continue this level of activity for another four or five weeks? Thursday night was also the first time that I've had any swelling at all. Wow, it's like every third trimester symptom was coming crashing down on me at once.

And then yesterday morning, I was sitting in one of our committee meetings and had about four Braxton Hicks contractions in the span of 45 minutes, and I started panicking, since I know the magic number is at least 4 in an hour.  I immediately wondered if I should go to Labor and Delivery. A co-worker, who has boy-girl twins grabbed her purse and told me she would drive me.  Meanwhile, I called Labor and Delivery, and after hearing my symptoms (no pain, no bleeding) I was told to put my feet up and drink a lot of water.  I work for a healthcare membership association, so one of our board members, who is a family practice physician, came in and also talked me down.  He said it would probably be wise to go home and take a bath and also that it's totally normal for a second pregnancy to get more and more BH contractions.

The same co-worker said she'd drive me home, but I demurred, since I wasn't in any pain, and I didn't want to have to drive all the way back to work to get my car later.  Once I was home, I sat down and tried to relax, although I was still having BH contractions every 10 to 15 minutes.  My OB's office called to inform me that my 32 week appointment was cancelled as my doctor was now officially on maternity leave because she was having contractions, so they rescheduled me with a new OB for a couple hours later.

At the appointment, I had my weight and blood pressure checked, and I knew my blood pressure was much higher than normal. The medical assistant didn't seem concerned, probably because the computers were down and couldn't see that my blood pressure is usually much, much lower.  I talked to the new doctor about my symptoms from the past few days and the stress I've been under at work, and she went ahead and checked to see if I was dilating.  Luckily, I'm not at all.  She also recommended that I have a non-stress test to see if I was actually contracting, so after the normal prenatal exam, I was taken to another room while a nurse hooked me up to the monitors.  I also passed the NST without any problems -- baby girl's heart rate was actually fun to listen to because as she would start moving more, her heart rate would accelerate and then decelerate once she calmed down a bit. But I didn't have a single contraction during that time.  The nurse also did an ultrasound to measure the amniotic fluid, which I guess is now standard practice after an NST.  It was at that time that I confirmed my suspicions that baby girl is still breech (all her kicks have been really low, like she's tap dancing on my bladder).  Finally, I had the nurse retake my blood pressure, which had thankfully gone down since the beginning of the appointment.

Anyway, all this to say, my body is clearing telling me that I need to slow down.  The stress of the new year (combined with the fact that we're severely short-staffed right now) is catching up with me.  It's time to make some changes, like taking some issues off my plate and probably working from home more.  It's hard to say no, but I know I'll be on maternity leave regardless in five weeks, so I might as well start slowing down now.  Thankfully, I have Monday off for Martin Luther King's birthday, but Charlotte has it off as well, so it probably won't be as restful of a day as it could be.  Still, it's better than being at work.

Here Charlotte and I are last Monday (at exactly two months to go):