This pregnancy has been pretty uneventful...that is, until this past Friday. As you can see from my last post, I took the kids blackberry picking and then spent the rest of the day running errands, going to Free Birds for lunch, and then a little more afternoon cousin playtime. I felt fine. Perfectly normal all day.

Then, about 6:30 that evening, literally right after I finished the last blog post, it hit me. I got terrible chills and couldn't stop shivering and my teeth were chattering. And then, my back began to hurt so bad I could hardly walk. I tried taking a bath to see if that would help, which it didn't. I was still freezing! I laid down on the couch and just kept feeling worse and worse. Once I realized I hadn't felt the baby move in about an hour or so, I told Nick to call L&D. They said to come on in. So we loaded up the fam, I threw on a pair of tennis shoes with my pajama pants and one of Nick's old t-shirts (I was looking pretty hot) and headed to the hospital.

The kids were already hungry and cranky so I just told Nick to drop me off and take the kids to eat. I thought, if anything, they'll check the baby, tell me he/she is fine, give me some Tylenol and maybe an antibiotic and then I'd call Nick to pick me up. Ummm...yeah.

What ended up happening was not at all what I had expected. My high fever was causing the baby's heart rate to be accelerated, like in the 200's! And I was having contractions! They finally determined the cause was a severe kidney infection but now they had to stabilize the baby, stop the contractions, give me i/v fluids and antibiotics and admit me into the hospital! All I had with me was my wallet and cell phone!

So they checked me into my room and finally gave me some Tylenol to bring down the fever at around 11pm. I was miserable at this point and remember I could hardly keep my eyes open. Then it took 3 nurses and several failed attempts to finally get an i/v line started. They ended up having to do an a/c line in the crook of my arm. And let me just say, if you've never had an i/v placed there, it is awful! You cannot bend your arm or even move it much because it burns and could crimp the line. And they kept telling me that if I get a clot from moving around too much, they'll have to put in another one!

They pumped me with fluids and some super duper antibiotic for the next 36 hours or so. They also had to keep monitors on the baby for the first 12 hours or so which made it nearly impossible to sleep. At one point they had to give me a medication to stop the contractions. Thank goodness the baby seemed to be tolerating everything pretty well and his/her heart rate slowly came back down into the 130-150 range. I was so relieved!

I finally got to go home on Sunday morning and was so happy to see the kids and be able to rest in my own bed...and get that awful i/v out of my arm!

So, what a scare! I still can't believe that it all happened since it came on so fast and now I am back to feeling like my normal preggo self. But, I am definitely taking this as a huge reminder that I need to relax more and take it easy. Just 22 more days until we get to meet this precious baby and I want to make sure I do everything I can to keep him/her healthy and happy inside until then :)

I had a routine ob appointment today and everything went great. They did the strep B test, listened to the baby's heart, and all the normal stuff. I go every week now until delivery so my next appointment is Monday when they will do an ultrasound to check the position and size of the baby. I can't wait to see how big they estimate this baby to be. I'm guessing big!

That's it for this week!