sunday night at the hospital

Phew, Sunday night (shortly after I posted on here about the nursery and told Elliott we were ready for her) Ryan and I ended up at the hospital, thinking I may have been in labor! I was having mild contractions for an hour or so, and they were about 6-8 minutes apart, but nothing I would call the doctor about. We decided to pack a few things into the hospital bag just in case, but apparently standing up was not the right thing for me to do. All the sudden, I started getting these AWFUL, debilitating back contractions - all I could do was drop to my hands and knees on the floor and try to breath, which was near impossible! Well, these continued about every 2 or 3 minutes, and I'm like, "What do we do?! This isn't normal!" So after about 5 of these insanely painful contractions, we finally decided to play it safe and head over to Labor and Delivery, which is fortunately just about 10 minutes down the road.

I had a few of the painful spasms on the way there, but by the time we got there, they had slowed significantly and weren't so painful. Still, the nurses wanted to check me so they showed us into a room, hooked me up to a fetal monitor and one that was timing my contractions, and did an exam. Turns out my cervix was about 80% effaced, 1 cm dilated, and Elliott's head had dropped significantly. Though by this time my contractions weren't regular or too strong, they wanted me to stay the night just to be safe. My doctor was scheduled for a c-section in the morning, so he would check on me then.

Am I in labor, or not??

The doctor came in around 7:00am. He said I wasn't quite the 1 cm dilated that the nurse had thought I was, but that the baby had definitely descended and her head is now super low and she's ready to go! He also thinks the back pains I was having were due to her being positioned against my spine (I've deduced that this does not bode well and that I may be in for some horrendous back labor, though I'm hoping that's not the case!)

I was released that morning and told to relax at home, take warm baths, and watch out for contractions that are regularly 5 minutes apart that last for 1 minute for 1 hour (5-1-1). So I'm trying to ignore my now sporadic Braxton-Hicks contractions and just wait patiently (ha!) for labor to really start. Tomorrow I go back for my weekly check-up, so we'll see if any more progress has been made! I will probably go back to work tomorrow, too, as long as he says it's ok, because who knows how long this waiting game will last?