You may not have pain....

I had my first baby in mid December. She is wonderful, happy, and healthy. Something I learned with my labor and delivery is you may be that person that doesn’t feel pain. Let me explain.

Here I was, on my due date, and having what are considered “Braxton Hicks”. No pain, just a tightening in my abdomen. It was pretty consistent, but they didn’t hurt so I chose to ignore them. Everything I had been told was, “you’ll know when it’s real” “it will hurt and be different from what you have experienced before” “if you can talk through them, it’s not real labor”. So I continued to ignore them. My SIL who is a L&D nurse noticed I was having these contractions that didn’t hurt and suggested going to the hospital just in case. I didn’t want to for fear of being a false alarm. So I settled on timing them. Every three minutes lasting for at least a minute. Continued that way for two hours then became every two minutes lasting for two minutes. So we decided to go in. I was still not convinced as they still didn’t hurt at all. Just tightening. We got there and I was dilated to a five with constant contractions. I was indeed in active labor and was admitted for baby time. My water broke a few hours later and then I finally started to really feel the contractions.

I asked the nurse why this is and she said sometimes the bag of waters will act as a cushion making the contractions painless until it breaks.

Moral of the story, if you are having consistent contractions, even if they don’t hurt, take them seriously. You may be like me and not have pain until your water breaks!