It’s electrifying!

Yesterday was my first non-stress test. For those of you who don’t know/don’t care, a non-stress test is when you go to the hospital, and they strap a thingie onto your belly so that they can monitor your baby’s heartbeat. It prints out on a printer. Every time you feel the baby move, you’re supposed to push a button – this is (I believe) to indicate that yes, the baby moved and that’s why his/her heartrate went up. This, apparently, is a good thing.

So, yesterday was my first, and it was so cold, I decided to leave my youngest at home with her daddy. My oldest doesn’t like me going anywhere alone now (because 10 yr olds worry about their moms, ya know), so he came out in the negative temperatures with me, toting his really COOL gameboy advanced MICRO that his super-cool mom got him for Christmas.

The nurses all remembered me from nearly 4 years ago, when I gave birth to my youngest (they remember her very unique name, isn’t that cool?) and are all very sweet at this hospital – I love it there. She strapped me in, brought me some water and left us to non-stress. And it was just that – very non-stressing. Me, lying quietly, concentrating on the newest one’s pokes, prods and wiggles. My dear son sitting there telling me about his game (god help me). Well, first, the baby gets the hiccups and I’m left to try to figure out if I should hit the button every time I feel a hiccup – but almost as soon as they start, the baby moved out of position, so the heartbeat couldn’t record anyways. I sent my son in search of the nurse. She came in, assured me about not counting the hiccups, and repositioned the thingie.

Back to non-stressing. All was quiet except for the whoosh-whoosh-whoosh of the baby’s heartbeat. Then, suddenly, ALL was quiet – no whoosh-whoosh. The machine had turned off. Well, what the hell. Send son out to find the nurse. In the meantime, I smell smoke… specifically, wires burning. Uhoh. Son comes back in, I send him back out – tell her I Smell Smoke. She comes in quickly. She *sees* the smoke. LOL Turns out, we’ve burnt out the machine. Never did it occur to me to TAKE THE THINGIE OFF MY BELLy, of course. LOL Nah, that’d have been using my head, which, I apparently can’t do effectively lately.

So, I have no idea how much those things cost, but our hospital is less one today LOL She, of course, assured me that we had nothing to do with it… but still, ……… wow! LOL