What exactly do you do when a woman comes in with possible rupture of membranes? I assume you leave them to let any amniotic fluid pool for a while, then check with a speculum and then do either a ferning or nitrazine test, right? But, what position do you leave the patient to let the amniotic fluid pool? Lying down, or sort of sitting up, or what?
I hope I didn't get any terminology wrong. :)
I'm a pre-nursing student, and I'm really interested in L&D, plus I had my second baby last month. So that makes me curious to learn about things surrounding my birth. First let me say that my baby and I are fine, no big complications, and I was able to have the VBAC I wanted, so overall, I'm happy about the outcome.
I'm kind of curious whether my experience was typical. I called my midwife to say I was having some fluid leaking, and she had me go in to the hospital that evening. I had experienced several small gushes of fluid, the largest one being enough to soak a maxi pad all at once. I relayed this information to my nurse. She put me in a sort of half-sitting position with my knees up, and said it was a "pooling position" (??) well, as I waited, I could feel fluid coming out and going onto the pad underneath me.
She ended up doing a slide and looking for ferning, and came back and said it wasn't amniotic fluid, just cervical mucus. I questioned her about the amount, and about the fluid on the pad on the bed, but she stated that you can get a lot of cervical mucus at the end of pregnancy, but that I would know when my water had broken because it would be watery like urine. I stated that the fluid I had observed *was* watery like urine, and she told me that as mucus leaves the body, my body heat warms it up so that it *seems* watery, but in fact it is *not* watery. OK, I use FAM, so I'm pretty familiar with my mucus, LOL, but whatever. I was sent home.
Long story short, I continued to leak watery fluid in small intermittent gushes, I started having contractions that night, and about 48 hours after I believed my water broke, my daughter was born. Meanwhile, my nurses kept asking me if I had had a BIG gush of fluid, because they were wondering if my water had broken yet. Eventually it became apparent that my water had broken at some point. There never was a BIG gush, even when it was time to put on the internal monitor, or later when the baby was born.
Oh well. But I wonder if the reason the ferning test was wrong was because the amniotic fluid leaked out onto the pad and so all she got on the slide was mucus. Is that the usual position to put a patient in? I guess I would have thought lying down would be the way to do it, but what do I know. :) Any other comments on the situation? I'm mostly looking to learn, and why not use my own birth experience to learn, right?
