The farce continues

I have to preface this post by saying that I originally sat down to check my email and write something half an hour ago. I was also on the phone with a friend at the time when I felt something go pop... you guessed it... my water broke. Something tells me we will be out the door soon.

Anyway, before all that happened, we had spent most of today at the hospital. Went in for the non stress test at 9, which gave good results, but when Dr. Bailey came in at 9:30 she said I was still only 1 cm dilated and that nothing short of dynamite was going to get this kid out. And I had also reached the point where I'd had it, and agreed to be induced. Knowing I was still not thrilled with the idea of induction, Dr. Bailey recommended starting out with a Foley catheter rather than Cervidil (i.e. a mechanical means of getting things going, rather than chemical, which she thought would have less risk of requiring the additional chemical interventions I didn't want down the road). The idea is that this catheter gets you dilated to 3 cm and then falls out. I agreed to come back two hours later for the procedure, then went home, Googled it, started freaking out, called a friend who'd had it done, freaked out even more after hearing her experience, then met Chad back at the hospital with an impending sense of doom.

So we're at the hospital all set to go with the catheterization, and I'm sitting there literally wringing my hands over what's about to happen, when I notice that the gloves the nurse pulls out come out of a package that says POWDERED LATEX GLOVES. So I say to her, hey, it says in no less than six places on my chart that I am allergic to latex... are those really latex gloves? And she says, oh thanks for pointing that out, I missed that, not only are the gloves latex, but so is the whole catheter. This would not have been so funny except that she was the same nurse who was on duty the night Liam was born, and Chad and I had just had a lengthy conversation in the waiting room about the comedy of errors we recalled from that night. So the nurse starts rummaging around for a non-latex catheter, and she can't find one. Soon there are no fewer than five nurses in the room, all going through drawers and cupboards and trying to find one, but they can't find the right size. The doctor shows up then (an hour later than our appointment time) and they are all passing the buck, blaming each other for not reordering non-latex catheters when the last one was used. The doctor (not Dr. Bailey, but one of the staff OBs) is looking for something to do in the midst of the confusion, so she starts taking my medical history and checks the baby's position, etc. And then she says, well wait a minute... you are already 3 cm dilated. We don't even need a catheter. And with that she strips my membranes and I'm told to get dressed, go home, and come back Tuesday morning for the Pitocin drip (i.e. the chemical induction I didn't want.)

I could either take this as very positive (i.e. I went from 1 cm to 3 cm in 1.5 hours without even feeling it) or somewhat negative (does Dr. Bailey even know what she's doing? How could she have been so off? Or was it the other doctor who was wrong?) Regardless, in the past 20 minutes or so I've had 3 good contractions. So the induction is a moot point now, for one reason or another.

Anyway, I'm off to finish packing. Hopefully you hear very little from me for the next day or two as I will be otherwise engaged. :) I am pretty much scared to death right now - somehow this all seemed less nerve-wracking last time...