False labor

I wanted to share my experience!

At 36 weeks I started having cramps around 2pm… I ignored them at first but as the day went on they got more persistent and stronger. I was mentioning them a lot and my step mom pointed out that it could be contractions and maybe labor was near. I didn’t realize that contractions can feel like the baby is moving and it clicked that I had been feeling them for weeks and mistaking it for movement.

I called labor and delivery around 8pm and they asked me if I had timed them and how far apart they were. I had been trying to stay busy and ignore them so I told her that the pain was persistent and never ending. She told me that couldn’t be contractions and to take a bath and try and relax and call back later if they start coming sooner than 5 minutes. I took a shower and laid down and that’s when I started noticing a pattern… they were coming every 2-3 minutes with consistency and getting stronger and stronger. Two hours later I called again and spoke to the same woman and she recommended coming in. So around 11pm is when we got to the hospital. They put us on a monitor to check babies heartbeat and contractions and checked my cervix. It was 1cm dilated. My baby is breech and was measuring small at the time so they decided to keep me overnight and kept the monitors on me the whole time. The pain got quite bad. The monitor was reading around 40 mmhg for the worst of my contractions. It felt like the worst period I had in my life? I eventually fell asleep.. In the morning around 6:30am the dr came in and I was still 1 cm dilated. She said she felt confident that I wasn’t progressing and sent me home. It’s now been two weeks since and at my last drs appt I was still 1 cm dilated and 50% effaced. I knew that false labor existed but I had no idea how hardcore it was! It felt like it was really happening! And at 35 weeks I woke up and my panties were soaked in blackish blood, so I thought maybe that was my bloody show. Nope! So much drama for no progress!

I wanted to post here because that entire night I was obsessively scouring the internet trying to understand what was happening to me and didn’t find enough information.

They told me that if I kept having contractions like these to take a unisom and go to sleep, and if they were real contractions they would wake me up through the medicine. I’m not sure how much I like these drs or this method but it HAS saved me a lot of potentially sleepless nights in pain.

Okay! Hope this helps someone!