"Mommy, if the baby comes now, will it die?"
These are the words my 8 year old asked last night as we sped toward the hospital. My wife had been having frequent contractions, but at irregular intervals. Because her pregnancy is considered "high risk", the doctor told her that if she started having more than two contractions an hour, she was to go straight to Labor and Delivery to be evaluated.
To add to this stress, she was at 34 weeks, 3 days into her pregnancy yesterday. Our last daughter (Cute Critter) was born at 34 weeks, 5 days... and had to stay in the NICU for three weeks while her lungs and feeding reflexes developed. We did not wish to repeat those three weeks of hell. So, my Monday night was spent holding my wife's hand in the hospital for a couple of hours while they ran tests on her.
Across the walkway in the Triage / Evaluation department were a few other couples getting ready for that magic moment, while we were desperately trying to avoid ours for at least another two weeks. One young woman had the fortune/misfortune of being there with her mother.
Each time a different nurse would enter their curtained stall, the mother would repeat everything she had told the previous nurse verbatim, even the sarcastic little comments and the tonal inflections in her voice. Wow. She must have practiced that little speech for hours.
Then, when the poor, suffering daughter was given some pills, the mother barked "What's that you're giving her?" The nurse replied "Something for the pain". To which the mother said "Well, I had five kids and never once took anything for the pain!" My wife realized that as bad as she thought she had it, the poor girl with the know-it-all mother probably had it worse.
The test results came back, and seemed to indicate that her body was not going to go into labor during the next two weeks. *sigh of relief*
We packed it up, picked up our kids from my grandparents' house, and headed home... quite grateful for another two weeks.
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