Day 23 - Thursday, August 14, 2008

Good news and bad news today. Second ultrasound of the week today. The good news is Wyatt scored 8 of 8 points on his BPP! He showed signs of breathing to get the last two points. Grace and Chloe both scored 6 of 8 points and Grace had the hiccups. Wyatt has always been slightly ahead of the two girls, so hopefully next week we will see breathing on them, too. The bad news is my cervix has shortened again, it measured 0.8 to 1.2 cm. Down almost half a centimeter. This really freaked me out, and it figured Bill had to work today. The doctors say there is not much else we can do besides what we are already doing. I am still not having contractions or any other problems. We just have to keep monitoring, which we will continue with ultrasounds twice a week. Dr. Austin felt fairly confident that I could get at least to 28 weeks, which is our next goal. Bill ended up leaving work early, with the insistence of his co-workers. I am thankful that Bill works with a bunch of women who are somewhat familiar with what we are going through. After we talked things through with some of the nurses, I felt a little better. No one knows for sure what will happen, but they told us they have had women up here for weeks with dilated cervix. Hopefully, I won't be to that point in a while. Right now it's just short!

On a slightly different note, I asked the doctor about the monitoring that he ordered the last couple of days. It seemed odd to me that I am supposed to be taking pressure off my cervix and then he had the nurses do the monitoring of all three heartrates along with the contraction monitor. In order for them to get all the heartrates, they were having to tie me down quite tightly so they could get all the babies at once. Very uncomfortable and nearly impossible with the babies moving around so much! Dr. Austin clarified that the nurses should just be doing two babies at a time for 15 minutes each instead of all three for 30 minutes. Why didn't he say that to begin with?!? That is more tolerable and we started with that protocol today. The nurses don't need to tie me down as much to get two heartrates at once.