when should you go to the hospital - 5cm's ????
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when should you go to the hospital - 5cm's ????
Do you mean 5cm and in labour???
I would leave for hospital, once I had regular painful contractions. It's recommened to leave when they are less than 5 mins apart or when you can not handle them at home anymore. But as I have quick labours, I was told to come in as soon as I thought I was in labour. It just so happen to be, that checking my cervix, probably saved my son being born at home or on the way to the hospital. As I still wasn't convinced I was in labour until I had a 'feel' and I would say I was 6-7cm dilated and full effaced.
Hi Meegm
You should not rely on dilation of your cervix as an indication of when to go to hospital. Women dilate at different rates It could take you quite a few hours to dilate from 5 cm to 10 cm. However it can also happen in less than an hour. You would be better using the length of time between contractions and how comfortable/confident you are when you are at home.
Another thing to think about is the many advantages of labouring at home for as long as you can.
When you are labouring at home there is less chance that strange people and even people you have never met before are going to want to stick their fingers inside you.
You are not going to be connected to machines that go ping.
You are not going to have someone standing there looking at the clock and saying things like “Its been a couple of hours now if nothing happens soon we will have to do a CS"
You will be free to wander where you want when you want
You will be far more relaxed at home and thus the labour will be shorter and less painful.
I also have a question ...
Since the braxton hicks / discharge episode last week, I have noticed that bubs is lower (I took photos and compared them, front and side on) and I actually feel like I'm carrying lower. I checked my cervix tonight and I would say it is about 0.5 - 1 cm long, quite soft, but still a bit thick and I could comfortably fit 2 fingers in with room to spare.
Now, I am not panicking, as I know that your cervix doesn't fully close after having babies, and this being #4 .... well, I guess what I am trying to say is that for all this to be happening now, would it be some sort of indication that I may go into early labour again?
Hi MM
It would be quite unusual to be able to fit 2 fingers into a cervix that is still 1 cm long. Are you sure that you are feeling the right thing?
I didn't have any internals so I have no real idea how many cms I was at any point... however I left for the birth centre when I was bearing down with each contraction and felt I needed to be in the care of my doula and midwife to make sure I was supposed to be pushing (ie. baby not posterior). I pushed out the membranes (sac remained intact) about an hour after arriving there so based on 1cm dilation per hour we estimate I arrived at about 9cm dilated.
Alan,
How many cm dilated would you be if you could fit in your index finger and middle finger? I remember being able to do this but still feeling my cervix length to be about 1cm thick. Is this unusual?
From everyone else's descriptions of the cervix, I am 99% sure that i am feeling he right thing - kind of like a mound towards the back ... I know where and how my cervix feels when not pregnant (long and pointing downwards and towards the front). But tonight, I felt what kind of felt like a rubber band on top of the "mound". And to be honest, I couldn't find anything else "protruding" amongst all of the softness ...
How willing would a doctor or midwife be to do an internal exam at 30 weeks? (I have an appointment next week).
Hi Mel
That is a little hard to answer, it would depend on the width of your fingers but I would say around3-4cm. However MM said that she could fit 2 fingers in with room to spare this suggests to me that she would be a good 5cm which would be more than what I would expect. There are other things to consider here. A soft cervix is quite easy to stretch so a cervix that is dilated to 3 cm can comfortably be stretched to 5cm. Also when measuring dilation it is only an estimation so what is 4cm for 1 person could be 5cm for another person or 3cm for someone else
MM
I am sure that they would check if you asked them to
Thanks for that Alan.
You might be able to answer another question for me. My cousins wife gave birth on sunday after 28 hours of established labour due to inadequate dilation. Aparantly she would only dilate to 9.5cm. Now I immediately thought, 5mm doesn't seem like much. How would they know she was only 9.5cm and not 10cm??? Is there a definate way of knowing when you are 10cm, IYKWIM?
The only way to say for sure that she was 9.5cm would be to use a tape measure but I’m sure that mum would not be happy with that. It is often difficult to tell a mum who has been in pain for many hours that she is now 5cm dilated just to see the disappointment on her face. What I suspect they have done by saying 9.5cm is letting mum know that all the hard work she has done was not for nothing.
Thanks Alan
My concern is that I had threatened labour at 29 weeks with bub #3 (I had some bleeding and contractions) and then went into labour just before 36 weeks. I was 3-4cm dilated upon admission, which a couple of days later was 5cm and by the end of the week was estimated 5-6cm, so they scheduled an induction to augment labour.
This time around, I haven't had any bleeding (but have vehemently avoided sex too, just to be on the safe side :lol:) but have had that weird experience last week. And although the discharge has subsided, the bh's haven't.
I guess these are all concerns i need to bring up with my doctor - I know it's hard / impossible to predict when labour is going to happen, but I have always felt that I would go early again this time (I have felt it with my 2nd and 3rd, and went early both times).
MM
Talk to your midwife/doctor next time you see them. Tell them of your concerns. If your cervix is starting to dilate they can put a stitch into your cervix to help stop it from dilating. Also if you are having contractions they can give you medication to help stop them.
This is such a crazy thing, so subjective and so different for every woman.
You know I have usually noticed fairly clear signposts in the mum's I've supported that I felt gave me a pretty good idea of how far they were and usually they've been pretty right.
But I had a birth on Sunday night that just blew all that out of the water :lol:
Mum's first baby, she went into labour at 42w and it started pretty hard and fast - minute long contractions that were only 3 minutes apart, pretty much from the get go. I get to her and she is barely flinching through these contractions and doesn't even believe she's in labour. We get to the hospital and she's happily standing there talking to the midwife, still not really bothered at all. They do an exam because these contrax are so long and close...and she is 8cm - been in labour not 2 hours and I know that the day before she was only 1cm because I went to the hospital with her for monitoring. Literally 5 minutes later she wanted to push and she was complete.
It was mad, how those external signposts just weren't really there! And how she dilated that fast and hardly had any pain at all, she said today when I spoke to her that it just felt like "a bit of a period" :lol:
Now thats the sort of labour that everyone should have. Apart from the missing signposts
9.5cm sounds to me like they wanted her to know she had dilated almost completely. Was she at 9.5cm for 28 hours? It is actually VERY common for labour to "stall" (or rather slow down a good bit and/or seem to stop progressing) near full dilation. The mother rests, the baby turns and begins to descend and dilation completes and the pushing begins. Shiela Kitzinger refers to this as the "rest and be thankful" stage of labour. In hospital failure to wait out the 1-4 hour break in late 1st stage labour leads to alot of c-sections. Sometimes they augment with sintocin which often merely serves to distress the baby, which then necessitates the section. In terms of nature too, the woman is at her MOST vulnerable when pushing. The end of dilation is most easily stalled by fear because once you're pushing your ability to run from danger is disabled, thus a woman who is scared will often cease dilating for a while at this point until she is feeling a bit better (often just the rest from dilation and the slowing of contractions or the slowing of the progression of intensity in the contractions can help with this).
The whole 10cm thing is very arbitrary anyway. If you think about the circumference of a baby's head, and the formulae for a circle...i know neither heads nor cervixes are completely round, but we DO use the measure of diameter (3cm/10cm etc.) to estimate dilations and we DO measure the circumference of our newborns' heads at birth. The formula for circumference is C=pi d, where C is the circumference and d is the diameter (which would be how many cms dilated you are).
If the cervix is dilated to a circle 10cm across that gives room for a head with a circumference of 31.42cm. For a baby with a 35cm head the diameter of the cervix would have to be 11.14cm. For a 38cm head the cervix would have to be open to 12.1cm.
So 10cm is probably NOT "complete" for most women, more like 11cm is, since most newborns have a head 33-36cm at birth. I really reackon (Alan you can correct me if i'm wrong) that once the cervix is very wide open the head is bulging down through it anyway, and basically "complete", rather than being truly a measurement of dilation, is more the identifying of the fact that there is no cervix to be felt and that it has been taken up to the point is has become "one" with the vaginal and uterine walls, meaning there is nothing between the two and the baby can descend.
Bx
How rude of her not to show me what was going on! :lol::
It was such a wonderful lesson though - and a reality check for me. Just when you think you have it sussed a bubba and mumma come along that make you rip up what you think you know and start all over again...but I guess you'd know all about that Alan :)