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I came upstairs, went to the bathroom, and was walking out of the bathroom when I felt a sudden suspicious wetness. Like every pregnant woman who's had this happen, my first thought was that I'd wet my pants, despite the fact that I had just peed. A moment later I realized that my water had broken, at which point I thought, oh. This is not what I expected.

A quick description of my labor with Molly: I was given Cytotec to ripen my cervix, and that induced labor. (I was 9 days past my EDD and they were inducing because of low amniotic fluid.) I knew for sure that I was in labor at 10:30 p.m.; went to the hospital when I hit the point of thinking, if these contractions get any more intense I will NOT want to ride in the car, and got there just after midnight; had Molly at 3:51 a.m. Oh, and water didn't break until she was practically crowning. I had pictured a number of scenarios this time around, but mostly I'd imagined something similar except maybe, you know, faster.

Ed was actually making dinner when this happened, so before calling in I sat down and had dinner. And of course I called my mother to come pick up Molly, and I called my doula, and by the time I got around to calling the Babyline (the clinic phone number for questions and problems involving pregnancy, birth, and new babies) it was about an hour and a half later. Which seemed to absolutely scandalize the phone nurse; apparently I should have called IMMEDIATELY. "But I was just sitting down to dinner," I said. "And, I was hungry!" I told her that I didn't want to come in right away, because I wasn't in labor yet. She didn't like that idea at all, because I'm GBS positive and had a really fast labor last time. "But, I'm not in labor yet." Well, she'd discuss it with the midwife.

The midwife called me back about 10 minutes later. My HMO has a midwife practice group that works in their clinics and at a couple of the local hospitals. You can see one particular midwife for your prenatal care, but when you give birth you'll see whoever's on that night at your hospital. The midwife who was on at the hospital on Tuesday night was Dorothy, who I actually saw for my prenatal care when I was pregnant with Molly. I liked Dorothy okay, but I chose a different midwife for my care this time around. Dorothy is one of the more interventionist midwives in the practice, and not surprisingly, she was quite bothered by the idea of me staying home until contractions started. Because, I'm GBS positive, and had a ridiculously fast first labor, and she wanted me to come in and get that IV of antibiotics right away. I told her again that I wasn't having contractions yet and suggested that I could come in once labor actually started. She was afraid I'd show up at 8 cm and there wouldn't be time for the antibiotics. We went around about this a couple of times (fundamentally, I really believed that I would know when it was time to go in) and finally she said, "Well, I can't MAKE you come in." I said I'd think about it and asked if she'd like me to call back before coming in when I was ready, and she muttered something like, "No, just come in as soon as possible."

I talked to my doula, and as one option, she suggested that I could go in, have the antibiotics, and then go home again for the night. (One thing I was thinking was that I really wanted to get a decent night's sleep, and I don't sleep well in hospitals. Does anyone?) So I called back, proposed that as a possibility, and the midwife agreed to it. Ed had already loaded the suitcases into the car, so I stuffed some odds and ends into a tote bag (a change of clothes, a book, and a towel) and we went to the hospital.

Of course, despite having had a collective conniption fit about how I needed those antibiotics RIGHT AWAY, IMMEDIATELY, once I got to the hospital no one was in that much of a hurry to get the IV going, probably because once I got there and they saw me walk in it was patently obvious that I was (as I'd repeatedly said) not in labor yet. My hospital has something called the Maternal Assessment Center, MAC, and since I'd made it clear that I was planning to leave after the antibiotic IV, they didn't actually give me a L&D room, they just kept me in the MAC. (Normally the MAC is where you go to get your dilation checked, and if you're an overexcited first-time mother, told that you're at 1 cm and that you should just go home.) My room didn't even have a bed, just a recliner and a second chair. They wanted to do fetal monitoring while I was there, which I was totally fine with. Now that I'd come in to get my antibiotics, they were definitely willing to work with my desire to NOT stay at the hospital. I had requested in my birth plan that they use a heplock so they could disconnect the IV between antibiotic doses; I had not expected that they'd be willing to give me a heplock and keep it in when I went home, but they were fine with that. They did note that my instructions were going to be to come back in four hours for another dose, but that as long as I understood the risks and so on it was really up to me.

I overheard the staff talking about me a couple of times. The phrase that got used a lot was "gross rupture of membranes," which is one of those unintentionally descriptive medical phrases, as the Niagara Falls of amniotic fluid that gushed out every time I changed position was pretty damn gross. The midwife got asked if she'd examined me to make sure my water really had broken and she laughed and said that I'd come in with a towel and a change of clothes, and that was evidence enough for her.

When the antibiotics were done, I went to change into a clean outfit to go home. And I noticed that the useless sanitary pad I'd put in my underwear was stained yellow. One question I'd been asked several times was whether my amniotic fluid was clear, and I'd said yes because I'd thought that it was. So, I tracked down a nurse and asked about the yellow color, and wound up showing her the pad. She called the midwife, who said that it was definitely meconium staining -- light to moderate meconium, but definitely mec. (Meconium, for the uninitiated, is the baby's very first poop. It's black and sticky and kind of tar-like. Most babies don't poop until they're out; when they poop in utero, this can cause problems because sometimes they inhale some of this junk and it's really not something you want in their lungs. Also, it can be a sign of fetal distress.)

So, now the midwife REALLY wanted me to stay overnight for intermittent fetal monitoring, to make sure that the baby wasn't in distress. I thought about it and talked to Ed and my doula, and wound up agreeing. So Ed went to get the suitcases, and they moved me to an actual L&D room. The nurse there set me up with a fetal monitor and showed me how to disconnect it to go to the bathroom; they gave me the choice of staying on it and hooking it and unhooking it myself, or staying off it and calling the nurse to do a few minutes of monitoring after each trip to the bathroom. I thought it would be less annoying to try to sleep with a monitor than to be prevented from going right back to sleep after bathroom trips. I also told them that I did NOT want them waking me up to give me antibiotics at 4 a.m. If I was asleep, I wanted them to let me stay asleep.

Unfortunately, I didn't get to sleep until about 4 a.m. Fortunately, they didn't wake me right back up for antibiotics. Something did wake me up at 7, though, so I only got three hours of sleep.

Next: Early Labor?