I wasn't even 31 weeks and my water broke.
That afternoon, prior to leaving for a scheduled doctor's appointment, I had thrown a load of laundry in the wash, grabbed a granola bar for the road, and kissed my dog on her head, reassuring her that I would soon be back. I jumped in my car and zipped to the office, only a few minutes away. Everything was going great with the pregnancy, especially after a nauseous first trimester. However, there had been some mild bleeding over the weekend that I asked the doctor to take a look at.
Midway through the exam, the doctor raised her head and looked at me strangely. As she got up and looked at some sort of strip, she asked if I had just felt a gush of fluid. I hadn't, but was suddenly very scared as the doctor started to look worried. She told me my water may have broke and asked that I return to the waiting room while she contacted the OB-GYN on-call.
I sat in the waiting room amongst a number of young families. A small boy sat next to me and was trying desperately to get my attention but I could not bring myself to look at him. I had been expecting a boy. I had no idea what it meant if my water had broke, it wasn't covered in my prenatal class. Do I lose the baby? Does the baby end up with severe disabilities? Are they able to stop the delivery process? I sat and waited and could see the doctor at the end of the hall talking on the phone. She then called me up to the desk and told me to go to the hospital in order to have everything checked. Since I had leaked fluid earlier they were optimistic that everything would be okay and the pregnancy would carry on as it was. So I drove myself to the hospital. I wasn't able to reach any of my family so somehow I managed to drive there, find a parking spot, get through admissions, and make it to the maternity ward amidst a stream of tears.
The ward nurses told me they didn't know I was coming in. So one of them reluctantly took me to a 3-bed room and had me sit next to a bed. I have no memory of how long I sat there but eventually a resident came by to tell me the doctor would eventually be by as well. I was then hooked up on some machines. The OB came at some point and casually checked to see what was going on. He then looked at me with similar eyes to the doctor a couple of hours earlier and told me they would check but it looked very possible that my water had actually broke.
The next several hours are a blur. At some point my dad, my husband, my mom, and my brother came. We were told my water had broke and I would be transferred by air ambulance to another hospital that were able to take pre-32 week babies. I had a steroid injection to open up my babies lungs in case I did go into early labour, and was hooked up on an IV to prevent against infection. My dad took my husband to get some clothes, take back the car, and get the dog. And then my husband and I left by ambulance and drove and flew 3-4 hours to get to another hospital.
We arrived at about midnight and the nurse put her hand on my stomach. She asked if I could feel the contractions, which of course I could, but I said I couldn't. I was not ready to deliver my little baby and all I wanted to do was sleep.
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