For peace of mind...

We spent this last weekend in MO visiting my godparents. We enjoyed the company and the time away. However, we did not enjoy the fender bender we were involved in on Saturday.

Given I was a bit shaken up, we decided we should call the nurse's hotline just to see if we needed to do anything. Being 6 1/2 months pregnant and in a rear-end collision, I wanted to make sure Little Bean was okay. The nurse gave me a quick call back and indicated she wanted to double check with the Dr. on call. The Dr. on call that weekend was actually Dr. Dutta (my doctor) so it was great. However, Dr. Dutta did want me to go the hospital to get checked. When the nurse called back, she expressed the Dr. was concerned given this is our first and even if only mild trauma, she wanted to monitor the little one.

So, our group headed to Jefferson Regional Medical Center in Festus and checked in at the emergency room. They asked if we wanted the baby checked or me. Clearly I was only interested in the baby, so we were escorted up to the labor and delivery ward to be monitored.

The nurse on call hooked me up to the monitor. They were checking for good fetal movement. They were also monitoring to make sure I wasn't having any contractions. The machine monitored the baby's heartbeat, movement, and then my uterus. She also checked my cervix and made sure it was still closed and there was no bleeding. We were monitored for an hour and sat listening to the baby's heartbeat just gallop away. It seemed a little erratic to us and would be slower (like 150) and then faster (like 180) but it all seemed normal to the medical staff. We had great fetal movement and I had to multi-task and hit a button whenever I felt the baby move. The machine shown behind me gave the readouts and showed the movement as little "glitches" in the line and if I hit the button it marked it too. I did pretty good marking all my little ninja baby's kicks. Little Bean didn't like the monitor much and kept kicking the top one so it just jumped sporadically. They were also monitoring my blood pressure. When we first got there it was definitely high for me. It was over 140/80 something. Usually my blood pressure is really low so you can definitely tell I was stressed a bit. That also explains the headache I had. However, as we laid there for the hour and calmed down listening to the heartbeat, it slowly approached normal. By the time we left it was 122/77, which is more normal but still high for me.

We were released and given a clean bill of health. Now we have to wait for the bill and hope that its covered by the auto insurance claim. If anything, we really did it for peace of mind and I'm glad we did. It made a long afternoon but our family waited in the waiting room below entertaining themselves with facemasks and the large TV.

On a much lighter note, the afternoon provided a great souvenir cup and my dad came up with the funniest line of the weekend (what Clay says is the funniest thing he has ever heard my father say.) When I told the family about everything and the word "cervix" came up, it became a "hot topic" of the night and produced some light hearted laughter thus producing the classic remark "That sh*t right there will put a hair on your cervix."

I think we all had tears in our eyes with that one. Thanks dad!