Spent some time in Labor and Delivery today without laboring or delivering

I went to my regular appointment with one of the midwives this afternoon. While I was waiting in the exam room laying back on the table I started seeing spots. This has happened in the past but never with any of the other preeclampsia symptoms, so the midwives have always told me to pay attention to it and look for the other signs but they weren't too worried. Preeclampsia is a pretty serious problem in pregnancy and can get very serious if not treated. The only treatment is delivering the baby so even if I had a fairly mild case I would be induced since I'm already at 40 weeks and it's not worth finding out if it's going to get worse. This week my feet were also huge as I showed you all before and my blood pressure was high (138/90). Last week it was high when I first got to the appointment and they rechecked it before I left and it had gone back down again. Susan (midwife) thought that since I'm 40w I should just go over to be fully checked out and make sure everything was OK.

So we walked across the street to the hospital and to labor and delivery. It was 4:30 PM. So we got in and a nurse got me all set up. They put the monitors on my stomach so we could hear and watch the heart beat and watch my contractions. It was cool to see how high my contractions were registering compared to what I could feel (which was almost nothing). They also had me hooked up to a blood pressure cuff that would take my blood pressure every 15 minutes. I peed in a cup and they took a few tubes of blood from me. Then they just wanted me to hang out. They said it would take an hour to two to get all my blood work back so we waited. They ordered dinner for me but of course not for Scott. I shared with him a little bit of my pizza though but he was still starving by the time we left. He was really good and supportive while we were there though.

So everything came back totally normal. They don't think it's preeclampsia at all. They just told me what to look for and to call if I experience any symptoms again. They checked me and I'm only 1 cm dilated. That kind of stinks but at least it's something. They did an ultrasound too and baby looks good. She was practicing breathing. Her diaphragm was moving up and down. Before she's born she gets all of her oxygen through the umbilical cord but babies practice breathing amniotic fluid in and out to prepare their lungs for actual breathing. So it was good to see her doing that. The OB thought she looked pretty big. She said she had long legs. The ultrasound measurements put her at 8 lbs 12 oz. The OB didn't think she'd be that big though. She felt her from the outside of my belly and thought she was more like 8 lbs or high 7s. She said there was a lot of variation in the estimates the ultrasound gives.

So I still have my appointment a week from today. My parents were planning on coming down tomorrow but now they're going to hold off a little bit and see what happens in the next day or so first. Hopefully she'll decide to make her arrival soon.

A couple of blurry pictures from the cell phone camera of me relaxing in the triage room: