Holding on for one more day

It has been an eventful two weeks with this little one. Starting at 28 weeks, I randomly started contracting every two minutes. Long story short, 8 injections, 2 visits to the birthing center and one hospitalization later, I boarded a plane for a 20 hour trip to get to my parent's home for a planned (but delayed) vacation. The entire trip, I was taking terbutaline tablets, a medication used to stop contractions but with horrible side effects like heart pounding, nausea, and tremors. I trembled my way across the world so our baby could be close to a neonatal ICU that could care for him if he came early. After arriving, I weaned myself off of the terbutaline and the contractions remained far apart. As a precaution, we saw an OB/GYN here and decided to do a test that, if negative (which they almost always are) would provide huge reassurance that baby would not come in the next two weeks. Well, as luck would have it, the test came back positive giving us a 13-30% chance of meeting our baby in the next week. As one can imagine, this news was startling for me and I struggled sleeping at night knowing that a preterm birth could happen to me. But everything that could be done had been done - I had received steroid shots to protect the baby's lungs in case he came early. We had ruled out any other kind of infection that could cause contractions. So now I wait. My husband and I have decided that we will wait things out here, in the mainland US simply because the care for premature babies exceeds that available to us back in the Pacific. In a weeks time we will repeat the test and hope that it is negative and we can return back to our lives and work, reassured that our little dude is staying put for another couple of weeks. In the mean time, I'm working on a jigsaw puzzle, something I haven't done in years. I'm enjoying the oodles of fresh produce that is cheap and plentiful. I think I'm eating 8 ounces of fresh strawberries or black berries each day I'm here! And with each day that passes without major contractions, I grow more and more confident that we are going to be just fine. Little Dude just wanted a longer vacation.