Contractions and 38 week appt

Well, I got my first taste of REAL contractions yesterday. I woke up with pain in my upper abdomen which didn't go away all day. Good thing I had a dr. appt that morning. At work, I had my annual review, so I did that in case I wasn't coming back for whatever reason. Got a raise finally after a 2 year freeze. When to the doctor at 11 and got a growth ultrasound. Everything looked good and she said the baby is weighing around 7.5 pounds. He is in the 80 percentile which means he's a bit chubby but still in a decent range. As I was laying there, the pain in my abdomen was getting worse. When I went into my exam I told the doctor this as I starting tearing up from the pain. He checked me out and said I'm dilated between 1 & 2 centimeters and my cervix is softening which is all good news. He put me on this NST machine (I don't know what that stands for), which can basically tell if you are having real or fake contractions. I was on there for about 20 minutes. The baby was not really cooperating, he was sleeping. So they woke him up with this buzzer thing and then we could see that I was having a few real contractions but nothing to freak out about. they only went up to about 35 on the meter which is not bad if 100 is the highest. The doctor said if they don't go away, then they will put me into labor soon but if they do go away, they can come back in a day or two and just come and go for the next week or so until it puts me into labor. Well, I had a painful day with some more contractions but finally they let up around 10pm last night. Today I feel better but his movements are getting a little more painful. I'm not really looking forward to the pain of all this if what I had today was just a bleep on the radar of the really bad contractions. Pain meds are gonna be the first thing I ask for when I get to the hospital.

I weighed the same as last week 172. So I'm still at 26 pounds total so far. He said my dizzy spells and blurred vision are probably because I need to eat more or better. My hands still hurt alot everyday. Yesterday I could barely hold a pen in my left hand because my pointer finger hurt so much. Not much I can do about it though. I finally packed the hospital bag, at least for the most part. I'm sure there are some things I've forgetten but at least I've got something in there.