Pregnancy Diaries – 35 Weeks

Oct 212015

Don’t panic, I am not pregnant again! 🙂 I am just catching up and giving myself a chance to get over the trauma of childbirth before writing about it.

Written on the 24th August

I woke up on Saturday morning with terrible stomach ache. It was as bad as I remember initial contractions to be but instead of coming and going it was constant. Paracetamol didn’t have any effect and the pain continued throughout the day. Luckily there was no pattern to the pain and it was nothing that I could time so I thought the best thing to do was to wait and see what happened.

By 8pm the pain was still there. I thought that I should ring the midwife just to be on the safe side. As it was the weekend the only place that I could ring was the labour and delivery ward. They told me to go in and get checked out to be on the safe side.

They put me on the monitor for a while just to make sure that there wasn’t any tightenings accompanying the pain and to check how the baby was doing. There were no tightenings and baby was quite happy. They then did an internal examination to check that my cervix was closed. Luckily it was but I did have some discharge. They took a swab and sent it away to be tested.

I got a phone call this morning (Monday) to tell me that I had tested positive for Strep B. They didn’t give me much information over the phone and they told me that the consultant would discuss it with me at my next appointment. My next appointment wasn’t for two weeks so I turned to google. I know I shouldn’t have but I couldn’t help myself. Some of the things I read terrified me.

Strep B is something that all adults carry at some point. It is perfectly harmless to them but it can be harmful to your baby during delivery. To manage the risk they put you on an IV drip of antibiotics throughout labour. As long as you manage to have 3 lots of antibiotics 4 hours apart during your labour everything should be alright. I never thought I would hope that my labour would last longer.