Thirty two weeks into my pregnancy with my daughter Kayli, I was stuck on a flight between Washington, D.C. and New York—stuck on the runway in the plane for four hours. The flight attendants ran out of drinking water, and my ankles swelled. Two days later, a Sunday morning, I was feeling kind of funny. I checked the preterm labor article in mama (the March of Dimes magazine for pregnant women) and realized I had many of the signs of preterm labor. I called my doctor and was told to come to the hospital and get checked out.

When I got to the hospital, I was 2 cm dilated (you need to be 10 cm dilated to push out the baby), and I was having contractions. I was quickly put on an IV with magnesium sulfate to try to stop my contractions and given a shot of corticosteroids to help speed up my baby's lung development. The contractions continued all day and all night. Around 2:00 a.m., a neonatologist (a doctor who cares for newborns) came into my room. He said that if my baby was delivered that night he would be there and that there was a 50-50 chance that the baby would need to go to the NICU (the neonatal intensive care unit).

Finally, sometime Monday morning, the contractions stopped. But I had to stay on the magnesium for another 12 hours. It made me hot and nauseous and disoriented. My mother came to visit me, and I kept asking her to have someone turn up the air conditioner. She kept telling me that the air conditioner was turned all the way up (she was wearing a sweater), but I didn't believe her. My body was covered with ice packs, and I was still really hot.

At some point, my boss called to tell me that the office had just celebrated my baby shower and that everyone had had a great time, but missed me. I remember saying, “That's nice.”

I stayed in the hospital for three more days, for monitoring, and was given drugs to take every six hours to keep the contractions at bay. For the next few weeks, I worked a little and rested a lot. When I was 37 weeks and 3 days pregnant, my daughter Kayli was born—full-term, healthy, weighing 7 pounds, 2 ounces. I went into real labor in the parking lot as I was leaving work on a beautiful summer day.

Cathy
Albertson, NY

If you would like to share your experience with preterm birth, visit the March of Dimes Share Web site, an online community for families who have had a premature baby or a baby in the NICU.