Pre-Term Labor Scare Part II: Living in a Hospital for Over a Week

I was originally given a room intended for high risk pregnancies where I could deliver if necessary. I was on the strictest bed rest so I couldn't get up at all - even to use the bathroom. This meant that I got to discover the joys of bed pans. For those of you uninitiated into the joy of emptying your bowels into a plastic container, basically you form a human bridge over a small plastic tub, relieve yourself, and then stew in your own filth while you wait for the nurse to come back to wipe you. I actually would point out if I thought they missed a spot while wiping. Once when I was concerned that my over-full bladder might make the bed pan runneth over, the nurse left an extra bed pan and told Mark that he could switch them out if necessary. (Uh, no.)

Bed pan montage!

The next day I was given a new room, and let me tell you, it was really exciting just to get wheeled down the corridor to see something other than the confines of my old room. Thankfully this time I was given bathroom privileges which meant I got to stand for the first time in 36 hours. I was given a chair for showering.

Shower chair! Not sure why mine has the hole in the seat...

However, something new was added, leg irons. My calves were encased in wraps that squeezed in and out (much like blood pressure gauges) in order to prevent me from developing deep vein thrombosis. The wraps were plugged into the end of my bed so I always had to get unpluged just so I could get up to go to the bathroom. (Usually my calls to the nurse would go something like this: "Can you unshackle me? I need to pee.")

Me, my leg irons, and lots of random junk on my table.

Leg iron close-up! Mark painted my toenails a few weeks ago.

This new room was a post-delivery room, and included another chair-bed for Mark. He slept over the first two nights, but after that I told him to sleep at home, because it's really hard to sleep in a hospital. I was regularly awakened to:

• take drugs at least 3 times a night
• pee (being pregnant that's at least every 2 hours). Each time I had to call the nurse twice - once to unshackle me and then again to reshackle me.
• be alerted that the nurse shift was changing at 4:30 a.m. (the new nurse would come in and turn on the light to put her phone number on the dry erase board)
• talk to doctors who would start arriving at 6 a.m. to see how I was doing

Next time...
Part III: Food, Dogs, and Evil Contraction Monitors