A Little Visit to L&D

I had a bit of a scare a few days ago.
It started late in the evening, at around 9:00 pm with an hour left of work. I started having Braxton Hicks, which is not out of the ordinary for me. I usually have around 5-10 a day, and they are typically after walking up stairs, lifting things, or walking long distances.
For some reason this evening they started happening more frequently, and they even continued when I was sitting down, or put my feet up. I figured that once I got home and laid on the couch with a big glass a water they might calm down.
I got home, had a nice big glass of water and reclined on my left side. After an hour, they were still continuing to happen about every 15 minutes.
Now it was around midnight and at this point they seemed to get more painful, and the time between them was 10 minutes.I drank another two glasses of water and continued to monitor myself. I noticed more pressure in my abdomen.
I started to get really nervous, so I grabbed out my pregnancy books to look up some information.
Everything kept telling me that you need to contact your doctor if you begin to have more than 5 contractions, even if they aren't that painful, in an hour. I had already gone three hours of at least five contractions per hour.
I decided that what I really needed to do was go to bed, because staying up counting BH's was just freaking me out.
I headed up to bed and tried to get comfortable, Joel was fast asleep beside me. Unfortunately, every time I seemed to roll over or get settled another one would come on, so I kept looking at the clock. Now they were happening every 7 to 8 minutes.
I had two choices: Attempt to go to sleep and just call my doctor in the morning, but risk something being terribly wrong and having me do nothing about it OR call the on-call doctor and ask what to do.
I decided to try the second option.
I spoke with the doctor around 1:30 am and after hearing what had been happening he told me to head to Labor and Delivery.
I woke up Joel, who was slightly confused, and explained the situation. He threw on some clothes and we headed out the door.
He was the picture of calm, cool and collected.
We drove to the hospital and arrived shortly after 2am.
The nurse took my vitals. Would you believe that my pulse was 102!? My b/p was fine, temperature was normal, and urine test came back normal.
Next they sent me for an u/s to check my cervix, and assess the boys' heartbeats.
My cervix was long (4.9) and closed, and the babies heart-rates were normal- both in the 140's. At this point we knew that the contractions were doing nothing to my cervix, so no pre-term labor. I had also only had 1 or 2 contractions since arriving at the hospital.
I was then hooked up to a monitor to see if we could monitor the contractions. By this point they had completely stopped. So we hung out in one of the triage rooms for an hour, watching Little Women while I was being monitored for the no longer existent contractions.
Since everything came back normal, and more importantly, since my cervix looked good, we were discharged and sent home.
I had a follow-up appointment today with my doctor. There is no concern since everything has been normal since. I will return next week for another u/s and check-up.
Although we had quite a scare that night, we did get a treat when they did the u/s on the babies. They gave us a disk of their pictures. The quality is pretty bad since they were just looking at the h/b. I am hoping that we get some good ones at the next appointment so I can scan them for everyone to see.