The first one to tell me I am nesting gets it

I am off restricted movement and off the sauce terbutaline.

BPP yesterday went well. Cervix is still looking to be about 4 centimeters long and posterior. Dr. Best also expressed his deep and abiding dislike of terbutaline, for all the reasons I already saw last weekend while PubMeding the thing from my couch. There are no studies to show that it prolongs pregnancy, while there are plenty of studies that show it causing hyperglycemic reactions and raising heart rate in the mother (check and check), and, more disturbingly, some reports of impact on fetal hearts with prolonged use, as well as some small studies of neural impact in rodents. The last, luckily for us, preferentially impacting females, and at what I think is a much higher dose than what I was taking. Of course I wasn't taking it for pre-term labor (since I am not, at least for now, in PTL), but rather for symptomatic relief, and I think I had taken a total of three pills since Tuesday afternoon. But I am not to use it anymore. I can use Tylenol, Benadryl, or Tylenol PM (which is just Tylenol with Benadryl). Lovely and appetizing choices all.

After Dr. Best mentioned that while it is pretty clear now that terbutaline is not doing "what we thought it was doing," it is still a standard of care in many places, and that in most community hospitals if you come in with contractions, you are likely to get about three shots of it before you ever see a doctor, JD spent the evening pondering how come doctors do not have professional responsibility standards that would require them to keep up with research and changing knowledge.

I spent my evening contemplating the other thing Dr. Best said-- that after tomorrow, which would mark 32 weeks, were I to go into actual labor, he would only attempt to slow it down (with magnesium, yum!) enough to get steroids into me. After tomorrow, people. Nevertheless, I am surprisingly calm about that, likely, I think, due to the fact that the baby is supposedly pushing 4 lbs by now. Probably also a little because, as scary as that would be, it would mark the end of my exhaustingly solitary shift as the Protector. I am still trying to formulate my thoughts on that. Hopefully in a few days.

We also finally have guidelines for when to go in that I feel are concrete enough to be useful. Any time we want to check on the baby (said for the upteenth time, but finally seemed to have registered with JD who has felt a little guilty for going in so many times with what has so far always, thankfully, turned out to be false alarms. I have never felt guilty about it, though I have, on occasion, felt a little silly after an innocuous explanation for my scare of the day had been revealed), and if contractions feel qualitatively different. This last bit is good because the four or five an hour guideline is utterly useless to me, seeing as if I get going, I contract every three to four minutes. I do that when I am in labor for real too, so it's not that surprising, but it does make decision making much more difficult than it is meant to be in these cases. I am also not officially under house arrest anymore, but rest and hydration are my main weapons for when contractions do show, so it is all relative.


I was all happy last night when 11pm rolled around and there had been no contractions. I was getting cocky thinking they have left me alone. But they eventually showed up, and, annoying fuckers that they are, stayed the night. I didn't take anything overnight because I had to get up early and help get JD and Monkey out of the house for the two hour car trip to an all-day Bar Mitzva festivity in a neighboring state. They were gone by 7:30am, and nearly two liters of soda water and an hour and a half later, so were the contractions. Finally.

Since then I ate, read some blogs, finished loading the dishwasher that was almost ready to go, ran that, did two loads of laundry, unloaded the dishwasher, loaded what dirty dishes remained, washed the few wash-by-hand items, you know, by hand, wiped down my counter, ate again, and am now planning to head upstairs to take a shower and bring down the two semi-scary piles of laundry that have accumulated there since my dances with contractions began. I think this is all due to finally being officially allowed to do stuff. And I would caution those of you who are tempted to offer a different explanation to first review the title of this post.