Things always seem worse at night, don't they?
Yesterday was a rough day.
First, some background. In an odd coincidence, in my small office of about 2 dozen people there are four of us expecting in a three week period. Weird, huh? So the first of my colleague's wives had their baby girl a couple of days ago, a little more than two weeks early.
I found this to be a stressful reminder of how much I have to finish up, work wise, before bean arrival. So between that stress and this unshakable, hacking night cough, I ended up coming down at 4 AM yesterday morning, wide awake, and getting some work done. Not such a bad thing, really, since it made me feel much better to be productive.
At work, I learned that another co-worker thought his wife had gone into labor the night before - turned out to be a false alarm, but another reminder that babies come when babies come. It didn't help that all day I was plagued with contractions. Not regular, so not worrisome, but intense.
Fast forward to the end of the day. As the evening wears on, the Hacking Night Cough (or HNC, as it shall now be known), got worse and worse. So I settle down to do my evening kick count.
Nothing. Not a peep from the bean.
At first I don't worry. Honestly, the HNC was so intense and it was driving up my own heart rate so much, it was hard to even tell what was going on inside.
But hours begin to go by. I try all the old standbys - juice, belly wiggling, shower. A couple of minor twitches and that's it.
I begin to fall apart around 11 PM. Mostly, I think, because I just really don't feel well. The HNC is getting more and more intense, coughing to the point of retching, white lightning bolts across my eyes, searing pain in the chest. And still no movement from the bean.
My husband tries to reassure me. I cry, I try to go to bed. I toss and turn. No baby movement.
At 1 AM, I decide to call the doctor, because everything in me was screaming something is not right. On a tangential note, I feel like this pregnancy has wreaked havoc on my gut instincts. Every time I feel everything is great, I get bad news. Just when I'm feeling the sense of doom, everything looks fine. So it's become very hard to trust myself.
As it turns out, it was my actual OB (it's a medium sized practice) who was on call at the hospital last night, and she basically said she wasn't too worried, and I should drink some more juice and give it a little time, but I was welcome to come into L&D and get hooked up anytime I needed reassurance. She virtually held my hand, patted me on the back, and told me I wasn't going crazy for being paranoid. And she casually mentioned that steroid injections can change a baby's activity levels.
A little reassured, I drank some more juice, felt a small flurry of movement at 2 AM, and that was enough to relax me to go to sleep, as well as I was able with the plague of HNC.
This morning, I got up early, as the house was quiet and sleeping. Crept downstairs for a big glass of juice - orange juice, which I happen to hate - and lay on the couch to do another kick count during one of bean's normally most active times.
Nothing. A tiny little flutter and then nothing more.
As I lay there trying to decide if I really want to go to the hospital, it resurfaces in my brain that my OB had said something about steroids changing fetal movement.
As it turns out, this is a documented thing - described in the peer reviewed literature and everything: http://www.nature.com/pr/journal/v57/n5-1/full/pr2005107a.html
This study, for example, notes that at older gestational age (34 weeks in that study, which is exactly where I am), steroid injections were more likely to cause a transient decrease in fetal movement. No big deal, returns to normal 1-3 days later.
If only someone had bothered to mention that.
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