In the hospital

Well, after 2 uneventful weeks of the doctor saying I was "doing awesome," I somehow ended up in the hospital all of a sudden yesterday. The trouble started in the morning when the nurse called to tell me that I'd registered 10 contractions in an hour. I gave myself an extra bolus of terbutaline and remonitored; doing that cut my contraction count in half, but I was still over my threshold of four. I remonitored again in the afternoon—same story: five contractions in an hour. That's when the nurse called to tell me that the doctor wanted me to come to the hospital.

Ted brought me to triage, where they put me on a contraction monitor for over an hour. When they saw that I was still contracting every 5 to 6 minutes, they decided to admit me for overnight observation. Once I got to my room, I found out that the doctor wanted to put me on a magnesium sulfate pump to "wipe out" my contractions. So they hooked me up and I prepared to be miserable. Fortunately, I tolerated the prescribed dose very well; the only side effect I experienced was that I felt very hot. We turned the air down and got a fan, and I was fine for the rest of the night (although Ted just about froze to death—sorry, honey!).

This morning I am having contractions every 10 minutes or so, which is better than yesterday but still not great. The resident told me that sometime today they will give me a steroid shot to accelerate development of the babies' lungs. They say it's just a precaution, but the nurse did mention that they give the shot to women who have a very good chance of delivering in the next few days. It's scary because I am not feeling any pain or anything different, yet they are telling me that these babies could come at 25 weeks and 3 days.

Please pray with us that I can keep these babies cooking for at least 3 more weeks. Thanks to a visit from my mom last weekend, the nursery is ready to go, but just about everything else (including those four little bodies) is not!