a typical day...

Thought it might be nice to document what a typical day has been like here at the hospital on bedrest.....

between 6 am and 7:30 am most days, one of the docs would come in on their rounds to check on me. One of the docs is in by 6 at the latest, she's an early bird...one of them comes in later and later. The rest are usually right around 7 am. This is on their final rounds as they are leaving from a 24-hour shift.

sometime between 7:30 and 8:15 am a nurse or nurse tech comes in to check my vitals - temp and BP at a minimum, some nurses do a HB check on baby too, some wait til monitoring. They also check my lungs, bowels, heart, legs.

Breakfast usually gets here around 8:30 or so. My usual breakfast is 2 slices of wheat toast, and cheerios. Sometimes I add yogurt, sometimes I add fruit.

Once that is over I get my morning meds - prenatal vitamin, colace, and Miralax.

Around 9:30 am they put me on the monitor for a NST - non-stress test - which is 30 minutes of monitoring baby Tyler's heartbeat (typically between 125 and 150 and showing good accelerations which is good) and my uterine activity (typically pretty flat unless I sneeze, cough, etc....although there was a period whee I had BH contractions).

And from there nothing going on until lunchtime. I usually use this time to get caught up on the internet, podcasts, or read. Mostly internet, lol.

Lunch is usually served between 12:30 and 1pm.

1pm is All My Children time!

Between 2pm and 4pm, nothing exciting. I usually nap or surf the net or take a shower (once I got shower priveleges) or read. Again, mostly internet, or a nap.

Between 3pm and 4pm, a nurse or nurse tech comes in for my vitals (and baby HB check).

4pm is Oprah time! 5 is local news, 5:30 to 6:30 is Friends reruns, and then 6:30pm is the National News (with Diane Sawyer). If Eric is working he usually gets here for dinner around this time. I usually get my hospital dinner around 6pm, but if it's icky, he brings me dinner (usually McDonalds).

We usually watch Jeopardy and part of Wheel of Fortune before he heads home to unwind and get to bed for his 6am wake up to get to work at 7. I watch prime time TV, get my PM meds (just Colace) and then think about bedtime.

I get my last check of vitals between 10:30 and 11:30. This typically depends if I have a nurse who is working 7pm to 7am, or if she is working 11pm to 7am. It also dictates if I go to sleep at 10:30, or later. I had one nurse that would do my late vitals REALLY late (like after midnight!), so I would get to sleep really late too. But generally I'm asleep by 11:30 at the latest.

When I was on Nifedipene (medication to prevent contractions), I initially took that 4x per day so I was woken up in the middle of the night to take my meds. Then I went to 3x per day and could get a bigger chunk of sleep, then at around 32 weeks i stopped taking that.

Eric typically gets here Weds night and stays thru Saturday afternoon. He puts up with my soap and Oprah time, and during some of the other time we watched Cold Case, or Overhaulin' (his choice, of course), or the Olympics.

Weekends are only different in the TV watching - the rest of the schedule is about the same. There is just nothing on TV so I get bored. A lot more time spent on the internet, reading, or catching up on podcasts.