The Plan

Thank you for all the wonderful, thoughtful and informative responses to my post yesterday.  I woke up this morning about 5am and had a mini-breakdown – and then I read the responses on my blog and was able to get myself back together and go back to sleep for another hour or two.  Anxiety and hormones are a bad combination – I’m so glad I can turn to all of you for support!

When I woke up again, this time to get ready for my OB appointment, I was thrilled to see a little pink spotting on the toilet tissue.  And then I had to laugh – the very thing that would have sent me into a tailspin 30 or so weeks ago made me very happy this morning.  Crazy.

Heidi (who has been so amazing to give up her life for the past two weeks and spend them with me instead of her cozy NYC apartment) and I drove to my appointment, and first went in for the ultrasound.  He passed the biophysical profile with flying colors, but, since he’s running out of room, we couldn’t really get any good pictures.  His cheeks were about all we could get a good view of, and they are HUGE!  So is he – he’s measuring 8lbs14oz!  The measurement could be off by a pound or so either way, of course – let’s hope it’s an overestimate. 

The good news is that there is a least a little action going on with my cervix.  I was dilated to a whopping one centimeter, and while he’s not fully engaged, he’s definitely down more than he was last week, and my OB is pretty confident that he’ll be able to continue to move down (which is something she wasn’t so sure of last week). I did ask her about an elective c-section, but she said based on the state of my cervix, she would recommend we try for a vaginal delivery.  Having her say that is such a huge relief.

She gave me two options – Cervadil to ripen the cervix, which means that I’d get admitted tonight and put on the fetal monitor, or using a foley catheter (the catheter that is usually put in the bladder to drain it) to ripen the cervix and staying at home tonight.  Of course, I chose the foley.  I’d never heard of this before, but basically what they do is insert a foley into the cervix, and then inflate the bulb in the cervix to manually dilate it.  It was actually a LOT less painful that I thought it would be, just some cramping when she got to the end of inflating the bulb.  I’ve now got a lovely rubber catheter hanging out of my hoo-hoo – it’s awesome.

I’ve had quite a few irregular but very painful contractions since she inserted the foley – which has me hopeful that I won’t need the induction in the morning because this will be enough to really get things going.  I had an acupucture session this afternoon that was just lovely and am now sitting on my bouncy ball to further help things along. 

And, while I was writing this, I had a liquid that is definitely not urine come out of my vajayjay.  It’s either the fluid in the bulb, or my water just broke!