Week 27: Tummy Tracker

Not the Week 27 photo I'd planned... This is me hooked up to the "contract-o-meter" at a very unexpected doctor visit. I was supposed to click the clicker when I felt a baby move as well. What a belly I'm growing!!!



Week 27 has just been full of surprises. Within days of the gestational diabetes diagnosis, I went from having a perfectly wonderful trackout day and lunch with my husband to the doctor's office and immediate bedrest. Here's the story:

Thursday morning I ran errands, and met Travis for lunch. Before we ordered I noticed something that struck me as just odd. Told Travis I thought I should call it in, just to be on the safe side so we did. Then we had a great lunch waiting for the nurse to call back. They agreed it was probably nothing, but said that since we were having twins and were "high risk" they'd like us to come in anyway to be looked at. So we drove right over.

Three hours later we left the doctor's office. Not exactly how we pictured spending our afternoon. Apparently, my cervix has begun thinning, there was some indication that it had ever-so-slightly begun to dilate, and I was having what they called "practice contractions" every 7-10 minutes. It was actually very interesting to spend an hour hooked up to the "contract-o-meter" (I'm sure it has a fancier name) watching these contractions show up on paper. I thought that it was the babies turning over or balling up, which in reality they were... it's just that they were doing this in response to the contraction. Fun times...

They put me on bedrest, meds to relax my uterine muscles and gave me a steroid shot to jump start the babies' development on the off chance that things continued to worsen. I can get up to go the bathroom, take a shower, or get something to eat, but otherwise I am to be laying down or reclining. Bedrest sounds great, when you can rest comfortably. However it' s a little ironic that it comes at a time when I only have 2 or 3 comfortable positions that must change every 45 min or so (with great effort!).

Fingers crossed this helps me to keep "incubabyin" for a long, long time without further incident.

We went back for a second check today, and received a second steroid shot. Nothing was worse, and they feel like we did a good job catching a change early enough to stop it. Now my job is to incubate these babies as long as I can. We also have a regularly scheduled doctor visit on Monday, so it will be good to have that extra assurance as well...