Another Weekend

What a dreary weekend outside! It makes the rocks, a/c unit and vents outside my room look more pronounced. At least when the sun is out there are other things to focus on. Not so much when it's cloudy. Everyone keeps telling me that the trees are blooming and everything looks so pretty. I've heard that the tulips in our backyard are blooming and I hate to miss that. Tulips are my favorite flower. Last fall was the first time we planted them and now I can't even see them bloom. At least Aunt Francie brought me some beautiful orange and yellow ones!

The past two days have been full of anxiety. It's hard to preoccupy your mind when you have worry taking over. It all began Friday night when the nurse came to "hook me up" to the heart rate monitors and contraction monitors. Just as background, this happens twice a day for an hour each time. It's not the highlight of my day by any means. They have to get 60 minutes of heart rate monitoring from each baby. The problem is that these are VERY active boys. They do not stay put for 60 minutes. In the eleven days I've been here (22 monitoring sessions), they have remained on the monitor for 60 minutes once! So after about ten to fifteen minutes that they are not being monitored the machine starts beeping/dinging.....whatever it does, it's loud and annoying. So I call the nurse, then it takes another ten to fifteen minutes for them to arrive. You can imagine how frustrating this gets. I swear I see the nurses more during times of monitoring than I do the whole day and night combined!

Back to my anxiety.... Friday night, the nurse was searching for Tristan, Baby A, the one closest to the nearest exit if you get my drift. His head us usually right on top of that exit, which in my situation is not a good thing. He's always easy to find, but tonight he was hiding. Finally after nearly pulling my pants off, they found him....low, low, low. I had been feeling some achiness and pressure during the day, but didn't think much of it. Now it made sense, and now the worry sets in. This can't be good. So my nurse says she'll call my doc and see what he wants to do, if anything. After the monitoring and a few hours later, a new nurse comes in and I ask about the call to my doc. Well, my doc is off this weekend and the on-call doc says that the babies will move around and at this stage of pregnancy it's normal for them to move further down. Gee that doesn't make me feel better! Does he understand the situation? Does he understand that moving further down is NOT a good thing??!! The nurse tells me I can get on my hands and knees to try to change the position of the baby. I look at her like she's an alien. So I go to sleep, upset and frustrated. In the morning I tell my new nurse about the continuing pressure. "Oh, those silly boys are moving around!" I guess nobody seems concerned about this, so I will wait until Monday and demand an ultrasound and a cervix measurement (which I haven't had since my arrival).

Yesterday afternoon brough more problems. I was having some severe stomach pains and just thought it was gas (since I don't move around at all!). By the time the night monitoring came around, it was to the point of having tears in my eyes. My nurse was looking at the monitoring machine and noticed each episode. I love how they classify this as "uterine irritability". Irritability? I would call it something different, but in fact it was making me irritable! So now they had to do a test to see if I was "leaking" amniotic fluid. Let me tell you, this was not pleasant. Then I had to give a urine sample to check for white blood cells. Urine samples are not pleasant when you're not pregnant, but when you are and your belly is so big that you can't see where the (*&$% cup is, it's just a messy pain! Then I'm brought some heavy duty pain killers with codeine. I sat here thinking something doesn't feel right and realize that I've been on three different antibiotics in ten days. Women probably know what that may mean! Enough worrying and by 11:30 off to sleepland I go.


So here I sit Sunday morning, feeling better but not wonderful. Knowing that everything is most likely okay, but still having some worry. Some highlights for today? I got a small carafe of coffee instead of a small cup! Kevin's going to bring Natalie over here and Mom's going to cut her hair. I started a good book last night so I have that to look forward to. I think I'll take Natalie for a wheelchair ride up to the pediatrics unit to look around (it's absolutely beautiful up there, like you're underwater with all sorts of sea creatures). But most of all, another day for these two rascals to grow! I don't know if it's just because there are two of them in there or they really are more active than Natalie, but they feel like the real Ringling Brothers doing a trapeze act! It's the strangest, yet most exciting, feeling you can imagine. When they're both going at it, my stomach looks as if I should have something popping out of it at any moment! I seriously don't know how they're going to get bigger in there.....they're already pushing it on rental space!