Depression: The Musical

Last night, the Braxton Hicks I've been feeling turned suddenly quite painful, although it wasn't so bad that I was really too worried. That is, until I began to feel waves of nausea along with them. It was bad enough that I couldn't sleep, and instead just tried to be as quiet as I could while Matt slept and surfed the internet. Matt ended up waking and tried to initiate sexy-time, during which a contraction/nausea came strong, I ended up in a panic attack, and in the middle of crying I blurted out, "I want to go to the doctor."

Matt took me to the hospital immediately, and from the E.R. we were escorted to labor and delivery. I felt silly, mainly because I wasn't having any bleeding or evidence my waters had broken. But I couldn't get out of my head every story about pre-term labor or miscarriage that I'd read where the woman had been having contractions and they'd been brushed off as Braxton Hicks and then when things turned south and shit hit the fan, there was always the same sentence in the story. "These contractions felt different. They hurt."

The nurse looked for the baby's heartbeat on the Doppler, and it took a couple of minutes to find. While there was only silence and static, I fretted and panicked, but eventually she did find the heartbeat. I wanted to cry with relief when she did, but Blasto managed to make me feel better instantly by kicking the Doppler. "Par for the course," Matt commented with a smile.

They hooked me up to a contraction monitor and brought me water and a specimen cup so I could try and pee. They said that they wanted to check for a UTI because that might explain the upturn in contraction pain and nausea. I ended up being clear. I had a cervix check, where the doctor said I was still tightly closed. Everything is fine. The final decision by the doctors is that I'm likely just having Braxton Hicks with an onset of round ligament pain at the same time, which is upping the intensity. They gave me a checklist of what to look for to know things are bad enough to come back into the hospital.

I feel dumb for keeping Matt awake and wasting everyone's time. The doctor gently suggested that I might want to work on my anxiety with a counselor. When I mentioned I'm seeing a therapist she patted my shoulder and said, "Good." So I feel dumb and crazy at the same time.

Since we got home, all I want to do is sleep and cry. Everything is fine! Why do I feel like this? Maybe this is an indication that I need to up my Prozac dosage. Or maybe it's just an indication that I probably shouldn't skip a week with my therapist again. I don't know.

I think I've got Matt freaked out. He's been handling me with kid gloves, it seems, and kept waking me up this evening to see if I would eat. I feel almost like he's walking on eggshells around me, and I don't like it. But the only thing I can think to do about it is to just go back to sleep.