False Alarm

Woke up yesterday morning sick as a dog. Made The Boy stay home from work, MIL came and got M. Started having contractions (tiny little ones) around 10 am, but they were sporadic. In the meantime, I couldn't keep food or liquids down to save my life.

By 6 pm, I'd had two really good stretches of strong, evenly-spaced contractions. Still clearly early labor (didn't hurt much), but we thought something was happening. But we sent the Doula home because we figured we'd be in for the long haul.

8:00pm, I went in to go to sleep, and did manage a short nap. But I noticed that I was again having contractions regularly, and these were definitely of the painful variety (though not incredibly so). I waited until 9:00, then called The Boy. He came in and timed them for 1.5 hours, and sure enough, every 3-5 minutes, lasting around a minute each! So we called the doula back.

By 12:30 am, the contractions hadn't stopped. They'd been steady and consistent for a good 4 hours, so we decided to head into the hospital.

Got to L&D, got strapped in to the monitor (me contracting all the while), and the resident checked me. One centimeter. ONE F'in CENTIMETER! False labor, so we got sent home, still contracting all the while.

Got home around 4:30 am, and went straight to bed. Seems like the contractions stopped the second my head hit the pillow, and they haven't started again. So now we're feeling sheepish and silly, and calling back everyone on our list to say no, sorry, we're really not in labor. Oops?

The good news is, the doctors at the hospital could not have been kinder or more compassionate. They told me we absolutely did the right thing by coming in, and that they could see that I really was having good contractions. They also let me go home, which is a huge deal to me. They said that they could keep me there, but then everybody would start getting antsy and we'd all be tempted to do things to move labor along, which (a) isn't necessary, and (b) and they know we don't want. That's such an amazing statement on a few levels -- first, that the doctors on call actually read my birth plan, and second, that they were completely respectful of our wishes. Both The Boy and I left feeling sheepish, but also really confident that we made the right decision in switching hospitals. That right there is the silver lining that practically dwarfs the cloud of feeling silly for thinking we were really in labor.