Update from the hospital

Well, I finally won my little battle for a shower--yay! I wish I had known, or had even an inkling, that I'd be admitted Tuesday night when I came in--I totally would have taken a shower before coming to the shower. But once the water breaks you're on the clock, so to say, and they want to monitor you and keep the situation under control. Word of advice to pregnant women--before you come to hospital for anything other than a dire emergency--take your last shower at home!

Ever since Wednesday morning, I've been asking every shift of nurses if I can have a quick shower to wash my hair. My primary ob said no... but every time a new shift comes on, I nicely plead my case and see if the on-call ob will let me. And this morning, my new cool am shift nurse said she'd ask my on call ob (who is also a practitioner in my ob practice) if I could and *finally* I got the yes!

I cant even tell you how nice it was to wash, shave, shower, put on clean clothes and get in a clean bed. Granted, it was all in a matter of 10 minutes and my feet were back to swollen afterwards. But it was more than worth it.

The other update is the POA (if anyone watches Design Star on HGTV, then you know this is Mikey V's favorite catch phrase--Plan of Action). Long story short is that I'm on 2 shots of steroids (every 24 hrs) to quickly help develop our baby's lungs, as lung maturity is the biggest concern now that he'll be a preemie. After the 2nd shot this afternoon, within 24-48 hours I'll be induced. So by Friday afternoon I may be starting labor according to the current plan.

Clearly this isn't the POA M and I had in mind a couple weeks ago when I thought we'd be able to avoid drug intervention. We are so in unchartered territory right now--I am going even earlier than my good friend who had twins a couple months ago. So the drug part is mostly out of my control unfortunately. I will be given Pitocin to induce labor and because the contractions are so much more painful and strong on Pit, I will likely have to get some sort of pain medication. I was bummed to hear that my hospital doesn't offer walking epidurals. So my choice will be flat on my back epidural or some other narcotic that's got a shorter life cycle and is basically less effective (Fentinol?). I'll see how things go I guess!

For now, M and I are just hanging in the room here. We're as comfortable as we can be--have snacks, computers, clothes, cameras and video cameras. I get my three meals a day (although lunch yesterday was a no-go, I asked M to bring me a salad instead). In fact, last night M and his buddy saw people bringing in boxes of pizza---hmm, that's a good idea too. We've recieved lovely flowers from concerned and thoughtful friends. And my other currently-pregnant friend and her husband came to visit us last night bearing candy, snacks, celebrity gossip rags and a birthing prep video--thank god! I signed up for our childbirth prep course, which was set for Aug 16 and 23, but clearly we aren't going to be making that. So we're doing the best we can with videos and on-the-job training once labor starts.

Looks like baby boy Dixon is making his appearance much in the same way his parents have lived their married lives--on the fly and never knowing quite when he's going to get here.

Cheers! Stay tuned. . .