Prodromal labor, also known as false labor (though the contractions feel anything but false), is very frustrating and emotionally taxing. With Austin I had about 12 hours of contractions that were irregular and painful. With Jared my contractions started at 2:00 am Tuesday morning and I thought that Wednesday was the day I would deliver baby Jared. By Wednesday night, I was still not in active labor and it was a bit disheartening, but I was being lovingly patient with sweet Baby Jared. Whenever he was ready, I was ready.
By Thursday morning, after two nights of very little sleep due to painful and irregular contractions, I was feeling more and more frustrated with my body. The only good news about not having a baby on Wednesday was that I was able to go with Darren to take Trevor to his first day of Kindergarten. A friend took a video of me that morning and the video shows me smiling and joking, but right after the video stops Kristi asks me how I am doing, and I lost it and started to cry.
Maybe it was the lack of sleep, or the hormones, or the contractions, or the fact that I was sending my sweet Trevor off to school. Heck, maybe it was all of the above.
While Trevor was unfazed by my crying episode, Austin was very concerned and when I tried to leave him with Kristi and her son (his best friend, Max) he would not let me go. It seemed he could sense that within a few short hours his life would change forever as he knew it with the addition of a new baby. Finally, I was able to go and left Austin in the care of good friends while went home to take a Benadryl-induced nap.
I woke from my nap around 1:00 pm and was still having annoyingly irregular contractions. I called Melissa, the midwife on-call, and she agreed to see me in the office to see if my cervix had made any change after 36 hours of contractions. On Monday, I was 2 cm dilated, but my cervix was not softening much at all. I told Melissa that if I hadn't made change I would consider a c-section. Her response, "Come see me my dear, and we'll see how much things have changed."
Things had changed for the better and after finding out that I was now almost 4 cm dilated and 60% effaced I put the thought of a c-section out of my mind. After Melissa stripped my membranes I went home to get my ducks in a row in hopes that Jared would come soon. Kristi picked up Trevor from school and we made plans to have him spend the night at her house so that he could go to school in the morning. When Darren got home from work he took Austin to Granny CJ's house to spend the night.
While Darren was gone, I got into a warm bath and timed my contractions which were now about 4 mins apart. As the night wore on my contractions never got closer together, but they did start to get more and more painful and by 7:30 I was having a hard time talking through them, so we called Melissa and decided to head into the birth center.
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