Preterm Labor At 33 Weeks Pregnant: My Scary Experience

As you get into your third trimester, you naturally start to get excited to meet this new baby you’ve been growing for the last 8 months! But what no one expects or even wants, is preterm labor. This is my experience and all of the symptoms I had leading up to it! 

He’s Okay!

First, let me preface it by saying that our son is okay! He is healthy and perfectly safe! We ended up holding out until the day I turned 37 weeks, and that night I went into labor. Had he been born even a day earlier, he would’ve been considered premature. We were all on the edges of our seats for a while, but we made it, and he was completely healthy!

First & second trimester

My first and second trimesters were pretty boring. There’s not much to say about them honestly. There were no red flags initially, all of my blood tests were coming back looking perfectly fine, and I was even managing my chronic illness (POTS) pretty well. None of us saw this coming!

Things started to change..

Initially, the only thing we noticed was my blood pressure was reading a little bit high. Not astronomical, and it wasn’t even giving me any symptoms, so my Midwife decided to just send me for some liver testing to make sure we weren’t heading towards preeclampsia! 
That test came back with my liver enzymes just barely high. I’m talking 1 or 2 numbers over their “normal” limit. My midwife told me this, but then she told me that this doesn’t look like a clinical presentation of preeclampsia because typically someone who is preeclamptic has numbers 100+ over the limit. Considering mine were so minimally elevated, we decided to just monitor the baby closely and wait.

The big change..

After that, I had a few weeks until my next appointment. At that time, I started to notice I was spotting some blood, having some slightly painful contractions, and I thought I was losing pieces of my mucus plug. I began to get pretty nervous, mainly because of the bright red streaks of blood I was seeing when I went to the bathroom. I called my midwife’s nurse and told her everything, and they decided to bring me in just to be on the safe side. 

My midwife came into the room and decided to do a cervical check and sonogram that day. My midwife was shocked when she did the cervical check and began to tell me I was 3cm dilated and 70% effaced. I was only 33 weeks pregnant at this time. This news was completely unexpected and startling.  I later learned the blood I was seeing when I was going to the bathroom was actually caused by my cervix dilating. Sometimes intimacy during pregnancy can irritate the blood vessels of the cervix and cause some spotting, but if you haven’t been intimate recently and you start to notice spotting, I would advise you to alert your midwife immediately!

That day we decided to do a steroid shot that would help develop the baby’s lungs faster, because my risk of going into labor was extremely high at this time. This steroid shot is very painful by the way, and I was required to get two doses of it 24 hours apart. Following all of this, I was now seeing my midwife weekly for my appointments.

Contractions started

I ended up getting regular contractions 5-7 minutes apart on two separate occasions. We went into L&D for concerns of preterm labor and they had to give me some medications to make them stop. Still to this day, no one knows why my body was trying so hard to go into preterm labor so early, but the important part is that my baby was handling the contractions well, not showing any signs of stress, and my water was not broken.

We also did several tests called the Fetal Fibronectin swab (fFN), it’s a test that is used to predict the risk of preterm labor. It tests for a protein that acts as a “glue” between the amniotic sac and the uterus, if this protein is detected, this indicates you are at a high risk of going into preterm labor within the next week. A negative result is not definitive, because the test does not have a 100% reliability. If you receive a negative result, this indicates that your risk of preterm labor is low for the next 1-2 weeks.

Labor

My labor with him was incredibly fast. Considering I was 3cm dilated for over a month, my body was READY. By the time I got to the hospital I was 5cm dilated, and about 3 hours later he was earthside and meeting his big brother. 

*Shout out to my midwife for letting my oldest son be there through my labor. That was such a special moment having them both there together and I highly recommend it if you have the opportunity to do so. 

Conclusion

We made it to 37 weeks! It was rough, and man, my body was tired! But the important thing is we made it, and we didn’t have to spend a single minute in the NICU. 

My purpose for writing this stems from my own experience. I was so scared when they told me I was dilating so early on, I scoured the internet for someone in a similar situation and I really couldn’t find anything. I’m hoping that by sharing my experience, I can help someone else out there breathe a little easier through their last few weeks of pregnancy. It is totally possible to keep the baby in, despite dilating so early on! Don’t lose hope, and don’t freak yourself out about a NICU stay or any other worst case scenarios. 

You’ve got this, mama!