37 Week Excitement

We went in for our 37 week check on Wednesday. Melissa's blood pressure was up a little bit (140/86 for you health professionals out there), but it wasn't enough for the doc to do anything yet. She was still dilated 2.5 cm but the cervix had thinned out more 70%. Thus, it was back to the waiting game for another week...until Friday.

On Friday night, Melissa started having contractions that were stronger than they had been and they were coming pretty close together (about 5 to 10 minutes apart) for about a 2 hours. We decided to do the lay on the left side and drink a bunch of water thing and the contractions stopped after 30 minutes. We figured we better check her blood pressure and it turned out to be high (150/100) so we gave the doc a call. They wanted Melissa to come in so they could run lab tests and make sure she wasn't heading into HELLP syndrome again. Well, our planned babysitter wasn't available and Sheinah was already in bed so we had to call around to find someone to come stay with Sheinah. At the last minute, we remembered that we needed to do something with Samson also. Luckily, we have enough friends with dogs and found someone to take him.

We got to the hospital about 10:30pm and got set up on the monitors. The contractions had slowed down but Melissa's blood pressure was still high. After about an hour, they had Melissa lay on her side to see what happened. It was amazing actually. The contractions stopped (which we kind of expected) but her blood pressure also dropped to normal within 15 minutes. They watched her for another hour until her labs came back (all normal) and decided that since her blood pressure went normal when she was laying down, that we could go home. The deal, for this weekend anyway, is that we are to call them if her blood pressure goes back up. We aren't exactly sure what they will do if it goes up but goes back down if she lays on her side but we'll keep everyone posted. For now...her blood pressure was good all day on Saturday :)

P.S. Travis took a bunch of pictures trying to get the settings right on his camera just in case they decided to induce labor. If you click on the picture of Melissa and the nurse to enlarge it and look at the tracing on the right, you can see that Melissa just came off a contraction.