Thursday

Today's monitoring went great!

On Monday afternoon, I started using a wrist cuff to check my blood pressure twice a day, and it was giving me such low numbers (an average of 109/66 in the mornings, compared to Monday's appointment blood pressure which was 140/90) that I was worried the cuff was wrong. Either that or I had white coat hypertension. So this morning when I tested myself after the alarm went off and it was 119/76, and then 124/77 ten minutes later, I started thinking it was the latter. At the appointment, the nurse measured 136/86, and then I measured myself afterwards - and of course I didn't write it down. I remember the bottom number was the same and the top number was something like 4mm less. So that's pretty good! (Also, I tested a few minutes later while reclining and it was way down - like my normal morning measurements - so I'm thinking the relief I was feeling brought it down.)

We caught Ivy's nap today during monitoring - she had a few movements right at the beginning and then nothing until the very end when the midwife had already come in to talk to me. She looked closely at two decels, but said they didn't meet the criteria of being 15 seconds long before going back up to baseline so she wasn't worried. Then she geeked out over how much amniotic fluid she could see on the ultrasound. I showed her my BP chart and told her about the test I did with the nurse, and she told me that her husband had such bad white coat hypertension that they've been to the emergency room twice. She said that it made sense to her that my blood pressure would go up when they started talking about induction. So that made me feel much better.

After the monitoring appointment, Cory joined me and we got pre-checked-in at the hospital and then had an appointment with the Maternity Care Coordinator. She's a nurse at the hospital who goes through things like what to expect at the hospital, gives paperwork for the birth certificate, recommends classes and stuff - pretty much what the class we took did, smooshed down into an hour but with a little extra paperwork. She also started a birth plan - I brought ours so that we could go over that, but she wasn't super interested in that one; she had a form that she used instead that had spaces for who would be my support people and what kind of pain meds I wanted and whether I wanted the nurses to offer Ivy a pacifier, that kind of thing. She confirmed that the hospital's policies are pretty much what my birth plan is, which is awesome and made me feel OK about not getting to go through my birth plan with her.

She kinda rushed us through a very quick 45 minute meeting, and then we walked down to the emergency entrance to see where we'd have to check in if I go into labor after 5pm or on a weekend. The receptionist there said "don't come here! Just wait until the daytime and go to the normal hospital!" which Cory and I laughed about because the nurse had just told us that the emergency staff were afraid of laboring moms.

In work news, I think people are finally starting to get a little concerned about my impending departure. I had started training someone to do my daily paperwork but nobody was lined up yet for all the other stuff I do, until yesterday when Cory helped light a fire under some people. It's still not 100% figured out, but I'm starting to feel a little better about it now. I was telling my coworker yesterday that I have my hospital bag almost all packed and my snacks for labor purchased and ready to go, but I don't have someone to cover for me at work while I'm gone and that's no good. It's one of the last prepping-for-birth things that is stressing me out.