Sarah figured that Roshashana was a good day to take her car into the Volkswagon shop in Brookline. Her work gave her the day off on Tuesday so we pugnapped the little guy on Monday night. Leelin came along to drop off the Passat and I read an interesting article in CFO magazine about the Rise and Fall of Crispy Creme donuts. Luckily it was much shorter than the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich that is an anchor stabilizing my bookshelf. So with one car running for three people Sarah dropped me in Wellesley with Jeremy and began her day with an OB/GYN appointment to check her for group-B strep.

Among the endless litany of things to worry about in childbirth is that the nice innocuous colonies of group-B strep bacteria are big enough to pass on to the baby during childbirth. In other countries they spritz something onto the baby when it is born to kill the bugs but in America we use an IV to deliver a quick dose of antibiotics to take them out. The doula recommended trying to reduce the count, similar to reducing your cholesterol before a cholesterol test by avoiding eggs or avoiding poppy seed bagels before a drug test. The basic course of action to do so was to eat lots of garlic, in Sarah’s case in the form of garlic bagels, and vitamin C.

While you are swabbing around inside where a baby might find itself coming out of the OB figured it might be a good time to reach a finger in for an internal exam to check Sarah’s cervix. The internal exam discovered that Sarah was 1 cm dilated and that baby Madeline’s head is in the desired down position.

So all of this medical testing stuff was going on and I was busy doing some work on a datamart. As I am working I get a frantic call from Sarah letting me know that she has had a lot of bleeding, more than she would expect from the results from an internal exam. She then went back to the OB/GYN office and when they put the speculum in to check what was going on another big gush of blood came out. So she was recommended to go to the hospital immediately in case there was an emergency where they needed to suddenly deliver the baby through a C-section because there was a problem. At 36 weeks and with a nice healthy six pound baby rustling about they weren’t going to take any chances.

The main problem was that Jeremy and I didn’t have a car so Sarah had to choose whether to have me hitchhike my way down Route 9 or take the thirty minutes to drive to pick us up. She decided to pick us up and I dropped Jeremy off, and then we went together to the hospital. The main decision criteria was that the blood was stopping. But when we got to the hospital the staff was plenty ready for an emergency with guns a blazing ready to drop an IV into her to prepare for a possible transfusion or to knock her out. Sarah’s hereditary thrombocytopenia, low platelet count, had them all freaked out about any loss of blood. Their thought was that someone with a low platelet count will bleed to death if they nick themselves shaving. So any blood at all made them think that there might be some major internal disaster inside of Sarah.

But we calmed the nurse down to tell her that the bleeding had pretty much stopped. Sarah discussed the story of what happened at the OB/GYN office and the discussion centered around trying to determine the amount of blood that she had lost through various means of estimation like the color of toilet water and pad absorption. The room at BI that we were put into was far larger than the tiny room that we had seen in the tour last month. When we asked why it was bigger the nurse mentioned that they like to show the smallest rooms during the tour so that if a woman gets a smaller room when she delivers she doesn’t get indignant that she has been relegated to the smaller room and demand to be put in the premiere rooms. The view out the window was also better in this room. It was overlooking an all girls high school with the girls playing field hockey, tetherball, and hockey in the yard and continued outwards to Brookline. The trees below were starting to change but were mostly green in the Fens. I wasn’t particularly happy with one aspect of the room. Behind the bed they had taped a plastic sheet protector with a pink piece of copier paper inside of it. The words on the paper said “Have you counted your sponges?” The implication to this is that people regularly can’t count their sponges during C-Sections and leave them inside of people to infect them and cause sepsis. The solution that some administrator came up with was to put a cheap sign behind the bed.

The main activity after talking the nurse out of putting an IV into Sarah’s arm was to hang out with the fetal monitors checking out Sarah’s contractions and the baby’s heart rate. The basic idea is that the baby heart rate should increase when moving or during a contraction. For the most part it did this but having been on the monitor for hours Sarah had moved a few times and propped-up the bed to get more comfortable. This roughly coincided with a brief coordination problem of the monitor where it appeared that the baby heart rate went down during a contraction. Yes, Sarah is having little contractions every few minutes that appear on the monitor but she doesn’t recognize as happening.

This caused her to need to stay on the monitor for longer, but we were going to have to wait for a test that had been taken back at the OB appointment for counting her platelets. We also eventually had to stay even longer because the platelet test wasn’t going to get processed fast enough by the Quest labs so they needed to take a platelet count in the hospital. The idea was that if her platelets were below 20,000 (whatever that means) they would have to transfuse her with platelets.

During the six hours of hanging out and chatting we also got to meet the full cast of characters at BI. Since Sarah has a bleeding disorder she was the perfect candidate to meet both the high risk OB and the regular OB. Then she also got to meet two anesthesiologists who basically wanted to let her know that if she went into an emergency C-Section that they needed her to sign the consent form to knock her out. The nurse was also being followed around by her nursing student who got to learn fun things like – how to estimate the amount of blood loss from a pad. We even got the surprise appearance of a resident. All of them went through some of the same list of two or three questions regarding whether when Sarah bleeds normally if the bleeding stops or not.

We were there from about noon to Five O’clock and only turned on the television to watch the Sox-Sox match-up. By the end of the few innings we watched from the hospital room the Red Sox had bled so many runs that it was already over. We now have a good idea of what some of the basics are going to be like when we go in to deliver the baby. After the ordeal at the hospital had ended we drove out to Marshfield and ate a Roshashana dinner with my family. I took my last dip in the pool for the year after we tried to heat it to Sarah’s comfort level and failed and we drove back to Brookline through the back roads this morning.

The whole dry run dress rehearsal at the hospital made me think about all the things we still need to do to get ready for the baby including putting the car seat into the car at the police station, getting a bassinet for the baby to sleep in, putting the light dimmers back in their sockets, and putting-up the pictures that we took off the walls to have the apartment painted. Yipes!