Right now I am not one of those women who wishes the pregnancy was over. I have too much to do and our little boy is not quite ready for the world outside the womb.
At the end of last month I scared myself my taking my blood pressure at the store. The number came out too high so I called my doctors office. They sent me to labor and delivery for monitoring. Everyone thought things were going to be fine but of course they have to find something wrong. I was having mild contractions that I couldn't feel every 2-3 minutes. Apparently, the medical community has no idea how often a normal pregnancy has mild contractions because they don't closely monitor them.
The nurse, being on the nervous side, begged my doctor to let her take a culture of my cervix. After much talk the nurse got what she wanted along with a few vials of my blood. The doctor thought everything would come back normal (or so she told me later that week). The blood results came back normal but the cervix swab did not.
After another consultation with my doctor over the phone the nurse came back and told me that I would be getting a few shots and some antibiotics. I'm not a fan of drugs, they stress me out and I usually have unusual responses to them. Take codeine, not only does it make me violently ill it also makes me very hyper and I end up cleaning and vacuuming at 2am just to work off the jitters. Or Valium, that makes me very anxious and want to bang the doctor's head against the equipment for touching my eyes during LASIK surgery.
They ended up giving me betamethasone which was to help the baby's lungs develop faster just in case he were to be born early. That shot gave me the shakes for hours. I think I got it at 11pm and I was still shaking at 2am.
A concern I have is that they gave me steroids that make my baby's lungs develop faster. From all that I've read, it is the baby who signals labor to begin when he is ready. What if by taking that drug the baby will want to come sooner rather than on the date he would have come if we did not take the medication? Will my baby come a month early? Weeks? Days? Will he be late? Is it possible for him to come later than my due date in spite of that stuff I was given?
It's making me nervous that I will not have everything ready for his arrival.
Then there are the concerns about what my labor will be like. I'm more like my grandmother on my dad's side than my mother. Will my labors be as short as hers (35 and 25 minutes long)? I never experienced morning sickness. I haven't felt any contractions. My pregnancy has been completely normal other than that incident at the hospital. My doctor says I'll feel the contractions and "know", but then I read wonderful stories about unassisted childbirths and some women give birth without feeling any pain, they let their bodies take over rather than fight the contractions. They have their children very quickly and without much noise. I know that this is very possible because it is normal for many women in 3rd world countries. We've terrified ourselves of the posibility of pain and labor when it doesn't have to be that way. I know it can be painful. I know it can be very painful. God made it so that it would be that way. But I think the medical community is using fear to keep itself in control of women in labor. It irritates me because I don't think that medical intervention is all that helpful in most cases. I think it makes labor more painful, longer and more difficult.
I want to be able to accept the pain so I can get out of it's way. I've broken bones and torn ligaments many times before. At first it's a battle of the will to hold as still as possible. Then, shock takes over and I can relax and stop fighting the pain. How fast will I be able to accept the pain and let the labor happen? I hope that I will be able to surrender myself to God's will and accept his way for my baby's birth. It's going to take a lot of prayer.
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