spotting

I had a scare last night. I'm okay, the baby's okay, but here's my story.

Getting ready for bed last night, I went to the bathroom. And, in the ritual of pregnant women everywhere, I always look at the toilet paper just to make sure everything's ok. And it was there. A streak of blood. Not more than a tinge really, the kind where you're not sure if you're seeing what you're seeing, and you move your hand just to make sure you're not catching a glimpse of your finger through a thin spot in the tissue.

But it was there. I wiped again and again, each time getting just a trace of pink. Not brown, this was fresh blood, just not enough of it to make it red.

I called the doctor's office, they took my info and spoke to the doctor. She called me back within seconds.

I explained that it wasn't a lot, that it was just a tinge of blood on the tissue. That I was not in any pain…. except… well, yesterday I felt kind of crampy in a gassy and constipated sort of way. Not extremely crampy -  I wouldn't have mentioned it except for the blood. She asked me how fast I could get to the hospital and told me that they'd be expecting me. We got there a little after 10:30 last night.

I went straight up to labor and delivery and a very nice nurse was waiting for me. She took urine and blood and hooked me up to some monitors. The fetal monitor picked up the heartbeat right away and it sounded good and reassuring to me. The monitor for contractions never picked up anything fortunately. She quizzed me about my recent activities, but I've done nothing that could have caused bleeding. She did an internal exam (wow, that was fun.) and told me that my cervix was closed up good and tight like it should be. I didn't have any more bleeding while I was there. The labs finally came back and showed my blood was fine and that there was a little blood in my urine, but not a lot (it certainly wasn't visible to the eye or anything).

I was told to just go to my appointment on Friday and my discharge papers say "no heavy lifting", but that's it.  Of course, at 1am I was a little mixed up and my doctor's appointment isn't this Friday but next Friday. I have a call in to the doctor now to get that moved up.