The not-so-golden second trimester

Or, next stop, bed rest

The first three months behind me, I entered the next three looking forward to the "golden second trimester" everyone kept telling me about. I was thrilled when I started feeling the first tiny flutters of movement, around 15 weeks. And then at 16 weeks we found out we were having a boy. Long before we were even ready to have children, we had chosen the name Caleb (which means strong-hearted) if we ever had a boy. In the Bible, Caleb served to remind God's people that the Lord was on their side, even in the face of overwhelming odds against them. Our little Caleb immediately began living up to his name.

Right around Easter, when I was about 18 weeks, the cramps I had been experiencing on and off turned into some full blown Braxton Hicks contractions. It woke me up in the middle of the night, and totally freaked me out. They went away after a few minutes, but I knew it was way too early for me to be even having a few of those. I called my doctor, asking if maybe the fibromyalgia was making me hypersensitive to movement in my uterus. The doctor said, no, fibromyalgia had nothing to do with it. He said I was definitely experiencing contractions, and that definitely wasn't normal.

This wasn't the news I wanted to hear. But I spent that weekend on the couch relaxing, and the contractions didn't return. So I thought, well maybe it was just a fluke.

At church that Sunday, I told my symptoms to a friend of mine, who had gone on bed rest at 30 weeks with her first baby, delivered him full term, and now was pregnant with her second child and due right around the same time as me. I asked her if what I was experiencing was normal, and she said she had experienced the same thing with both her kids, but that she definitely wasn't normal. I just felt better that someone else had experienced my symptoms, and didn't think in a million years that bed rest was in my future. I'm not sure why. I just didn't think it was going to be necessary for me.

Over the next several weeks, I started experiencing several bouts of contractions.  It was starting to worry me, mainly because we were planning to go to my brother-in-law's wedding in the Dominican Republic in early May, a couple weeks away, and I didn't want to be experiencing these kinds of contractions in a foreign country, let alone a developing country with limited medical services. I started praying, hard, that the contractions would go away, at least long enough for me to be able to go to the wedding.

My doctor said it was still too early in the pregnancy to go on anti-contraction medicine, but he suggested I take magnesium supplements, which are used to alleviate muscle cramping and can help ease contractions in pregnant women. I started taking them, and they seemed to help a little bit. I don't know if it was the magnesium, or the prayers, or both, but I hardly had any contractions in the Dominican, even when I came down with a nasty bout of food poisoning and was puking all night in the hotel room. It was a beautiful wedding, and a wonderful time to relax with family and friends. Had I known at the time what was around the corner, I would have appreciated even more the ability to soak up the sun and to enjoy being pregnant in paradise.

The week I returned home, the contractions returned in full force too. A friend of mine came to visit over the weekend, and she could tell something was wrong, so I told her what was going on. I was around 23 weeks pregnant at this point, and she asked if I was worried that I would lose the baby and then have spent 23 weeks pregnant for nothing. It was a legitimate question, because I'm sure that might be a pretty common emotion to have if you lose a child in your second or third trimester. But, as I told her, I had no regrets whatsoever, and whatever time I had with my baby, whether two weeks or 20 or a lifetime, was absolutely worth it.

My main fear was that my baby would be in pain, would die inside me, and there was nothing I could do about it. It hurt me to think of him going through that. I greatly empathize now with friends who have experienced miscarriages or still births, because even though I didn't end up miscarrying Caleb, I had a small taste of what that might be like. My only comfort was knowing that if, God forbid, something did happen, he would never have to suffer the pains that come with living in this world, would never have to experience anything but the womb of his mother and the arms of Jesus.

Three small but powerful letters: FFN

That next week, when I was at work, I started having contractions again, but they didn't go away after a few minutes like they always had done before. So I called the doctor and he said that I was far enough along at that point to have what's called an FFN (fetal fibronectin) test. Basically they do a swab of your cervix and can detect if you're secreting fetal fibronectin, which means that the amniotic sac is starting to separate from the uterus, and labor might be imminent. It's predictive by about two weeks from the time the test is taken. The thing about an FFN test is that a positive result isn't necessarily a good indicator of labor, because you still have about a 40 percent chance of not going into labor in the next two weeks. A negative result is much more predictive. About 99 percent of women who have a negative result do not go into labor in the next two weeks. Needless to say, we were praying for a negative result.

We were due to get the results the next morning. That night, I had the worst contractions yet. They were getting stronger. We called the on-duty nurse, and she told me to drink a ton of water and get in a warm bath. After the bath I laid down to rest, and the contractions ended up going away. We were SO relieved. The next morning, the doctor called us back, and the test was negative! We breathed a huge sigh of relief. I thought, "Okay, that buys us two weeks at least." I went to work the rest of that week, and the contractions came and went occasionally. We had planned to go camping in Montana that weekend, since it was Memorial Day, but with the contractions and everything,  I didn't feel comfortable camping in the wilderness, so we stuck close to home and I mainly stayed on the couch resting. I had no idea that couch was about to become my prison.

Never forget in the dark what God showed you in the light

John travels a lot for work, and he was due to go on a trip for several days that following week. Since the test was negative and my contractions hadn't been too bad, we thought it would be okay for him to leave.

That night, I awoke around midnight with bad contractions again. I didn't have John there to get me water and draw a bath, so I got up and did it myself. I sat in that tub, drinking ice water and rubbing my belly, and tried to keep calm. I was more scared than I had ever been in my life. What if I did go into labor? How was I going to get to the hospital? What if I lost the baby and was by myself, either in this house or in the hospital, if I was somehow able to get there? It was just me, Caleb, and my dog, Bauer, who had parked himself on the cool tile floor next to the tub. I laid back and stared at my stomach, sitting above the water like a little iceberg, thought about the tiny baby within it, and scooped warm water over him again and again, praying and praying and praying. "Please stay put, baby. Please stay put. Mommy loves you. God, help us."

By 2:30 a.m. the contractions weren't going away, so I got in bed and called the nurse. After I told her my FFN was negative, she tried to reassure me that I very likely wasn't going to go into labor that night, and told me to try to go to sleep and to call the doctor immediately the next morning. I called John, freaking the poor guy out by waking him up and telling him I was having contractions again. He tried to reassure me, but was fuzzy with sleep and not much help so I told him to go back to sleep and I'd call him in the morning. About an hour later the contractions finally subsided and I went to sleep.

The next morning I called the doctor and he told me to come in. After examining me, he said, "Well, you have the most irritable uterus I have ever seen." It contracted at even his slightest touch, or my smallest movement. (For more information about irritable uteri, visit here). The doctor then checked my cervix, and it had gotten a little shorter, which meant that these weren't just false labor contractions. They were, in his words, "the real deal," as in preterm labor. So he told me that even with my FFN being negative for now, the safest course of action for the long term would be for me to go on bed rest. By this point I knew that bed rest was probably in my future, but I still couldn't really believe it. I was only 25 weeks. I had a whole trimester left, an entire summer, and I was going to spend it in bed! I would have to go on early maternity leave, cancel our vacation plans, arrange for people to come over and help me, etc. I was kind of shell shocked by it all. But the overarching concern was for Caleb. I would do anything, anything, to make sure he was safe. So it wasn't even a question really. I was going to stay horizontal for as long as it took, hopefully the next 15 weeks until his due date.

That first day on the couch I checked work emails, updated our baby registry, and read some books. I thought, well if this is as bad as it gets it will be okay. It's a good thing I didn't know what lay ahead. Because it was going to be a long, terrifying three months.

These two songs, "Overcome," by Jeremy Camp, and "Still," by Hillsong, were the ones I played most during those first few weeks on bed rest. They helped me to focus on the fact that as daunting as our circumstances seemed, Caleb and I were being taken care of by a Savior who had overcome death itself and would carry us through this storm.