Hospital Bedrest

If you have to be on true full bedrest, I think hospital bedrest is the way to go.  It's much better than home.  Main reason: people VISIT you when you're in the hospital.  Never had a day where I didn't have plural visitors and this included three visitors from other hemispheres! 

Not to say that hospital bedrest is glamorous, but it at least is interactive.  And another plus relates to the older kid.  Being at home on bedrest I am pretty sure I would be getting myself into trouble doing things related to the older child whereas in the hospital it was special time for both of us every day when he visited.  We had special hospital toys, games, books and more and I was able to really spend good quality time with him without compromising my medical restrictions at all. 

Just for my own memory, here's the basic hospital schedule:

4:00 - vitals

Wake up between 4:30 and 6:30 depending on which doctor was on call and/or noise level from the nurses at the end of night shift.  There was a cabinet that had doors that opened into my room as well as into the hall on the other side.  This cabinet is where they kept the chart, so often my waking up occurred whenever the night nurse went to get my chart to do her charting.

7:15 – Breakfast

8:00 (or whenever workload permitted the day nurse to make it in) -Morning assessment and one-hour non-stress test aka baby chasing

09:00- morning meds

10:30 - Priscilla, the food hostess, visits!

12:00 – lunch! And vitals

15:30 – Priscilla visits!  (Ok, it was only Priscilla 5 out of 7 days, but as Priscilla was one of the high points of the stay, I chose to remember her.  Actually she was such a wonderful feature of my stay that it is probably worthy of a post of its own.  Excellent policy Seton!)

16:00 - Vitals

17:30 - dinner

19:00 – evening assessment

Shower after fetal heart tones but before meds

20:00 – meds and vitals

22:00 or so – read and go to bed

00:00 – vitals

There was also a visit every day from an obstetrician.  If it was my actual OB, it tended to be around lunch time with the other eight typically coming between 5 and 7:30. 

I was lucky enough that I was able to work from the hospital, so I had a printer setup in my room and had Clear Wireless on my laptop.  I typically would work from about 5:30 to 7:00, then again from 9:00 to noon, then 1:30 to whenever Trajan got there and then one last bout from about 9:00 pm to 10:00. That doesn’t add up to as many hours as I did most days, but it’s close enough.

I also got a visit from Trajan every day either after school or at dinner time or most anytime on the weekend!  And every day I was blessed enough to have visits from at least a couple friends.  And my mom and Paul were both hard core enough to visit every day as well.