Week 27, Day 3

A number of things have happened since my Monday post. So much for a mundane week. hehe

Yesterday it was announced that J will be on furlough, or temporary layoff, for the month of May. Initially this may sound like a pretty bad thing but it's not. He'll be able to use his 2 weeks of vacation for part of it, plus I'm still getting a decent paycheck. We've also saved up for a rainy day, so financially we're doing just fine. We'll continue to be covered on our insurance, just like normal. On the bright side, J will be home to take care of me during my last few weeks of pregnancy and also have time to finish all of the baby to-do things. The only downside in my mind is that I wish he would be home the month after the babies were born instead.

Today I had a regular OB appointment. Before I went in, I did my hour of home monitoring. The result was a 6, over my threshold of 5, and pretty unusual for a morning reading. Those ones are normally 0-1's. The monitor people wanted me to retest but I didn't have time or I'd be late to the doctors. So instead she called the doctor so I could do my retest there. I drank about 30oz of water in the van on the way, hoping it was just another hydration issue. It wasn't. I was contracting every 3-4min. They checked my cervix and nothing had changed. Bacteria in my sample led them to believe that a UTI might be the cause of the contractions. In my rather large state, any little irritation can set them off.

So the doctor wrote me a script for an antibiotic and told me I had to go to the hospital to get the contractions stopped. This was not the news I wanted to hear. Luckily it was only going to be a day visit - no admitting. Unluckily it involved not one but two shots of turbuteline. Each one made me just as sick as the first one weeks ago. J got there in time to witness the ickiness that was the second shot. That seemed to do the trick, though, and stopped the contractions. I was allowed to go home. Yay!

I had a pretty lengthy talk with the head nurse while she was hooking me up to the monitors. What I'm going through is typical of a twin pregnancy. They start you out on the lowest, easiest to take meds first but over time your body starts resisting them. They then either step up the dose or switch you to another medication. In my case, I'm on the higher dose of procardia now. If I keep having to go back to the hospital, they'll consider sticking me on a turbuteline pump. Eventually I'll start resisting the pump and they'll have to "reset" my body with a magnesium sulfate treatment.

So at this point I'm hoping the UTI was the cause of my contractions, and not the failing of the procardia. Turbuteline makes me feel pretty terrible and magnesium is even worse. It's painful, makes me feel ill, and requires hospitalization. On the bright side, the home monitoring did what it was supposed to do, alert us that something unusual was going on. Also, the babies are still doing just fine. In fact, they swapped spots mid-monitoring and threw the nurses for a loop trying to track them down again. They'd get close enough with the device to get kicked, but then the babies would move a little more. hehe