After getting my membranes stripped on Monday morning, I had pretty regular contractions the rest of the day. We got to bed around midnight, contractions about 7-10 mins apart, not lasting more than a couple of seconds. At 3am, I awoke to some relatively harsh pains that refused to stop, even when I asked them to. I got up at about 3:30 and began timing. They were 4 mins apart, 30 seconds long.

I awoke Eric (actually the wind awoke him when it slammed the bedroom door shut, but same difference) at about 4 and let him know what was going on. I tried going back to bed at 5, with them 4 mins/50 seconds. It wasn’t working. We both got up at 6. I called the midwife. I hadn’t wanted to awaken her before that. She said to eat something, take a shower and come on in. So that’s just what we did.

We got there around 8:30. They checked us in, hooked me up to some monitors and answered a million questions that seemed entirely ridiculous to me. L&D admissions came down and asked the same questions all over again, supplied me with an admissions bracelet and gave us our “patient contact number.” Silly me, I thought that meant I wouldn’t be going home.

I was still at 2cm, although my contractions were showing at 3 minutes apart and 90 seconds long. To make an already entirely too long story short, they had me walk about for about 4 hours, checking and stretching (OW) me every hour or so. The farthest I got was 3.5cm, 3 mins, 90 seconds. Unless I wanted to be hooked up to Pitocin right then to get things going, they’d send me home. I went home.

So tomorrow at 7:30am is my induction. I think I may actually have a little fluid leakage but it doesn’t quite matter at this point. His head is so far engaged there’s very little chance of any infection or cord slippage. We’re going to try to get some good sleep in our own bed tonight in preparance for tomorrow’s marathon. Not that I’ll be able to, but it’s better than trying in a hospital.

Another bit of good news, no Cytotec needed! Takes a helluva lot off my mind. I’m still scared of the Pitocin and probably epi, but it’s 100% less horrifying of an idea without the Cytotec crap added. Woohoo!