If you are the squeamish sort, you can stop reading right now!
So for all you non-pregnant people, there is a wad of mucous that grows in your cervix during early pregnancy. It helps to protect the baby by sealing off the uterus from the "outside world", therefore preventing infection, water, etc, from getting inside the uterus while the baby calls it home.
Obviously this needs to come out sometime before the baby is born, and I think mine has started to. I have been having increased "discharge" for a WHILE now, but for the most part it has been very watery and clear. But since this "false labor" incident, I have increasingly had (mostly small) pieces of white/yellowish much thicker mucous resembling something nearly the consistency of undercooked egg whites. This morning I had kind of a LOT of it, but there is no blood in it at all yet, so I wouldn't call it "bloody show" (another awesome word for the fun aspects of pregnancy), and I have a feeling that this is actually a rather small amount of the mucous plug that I am seeing, even though it seems like a lot.
For people that have been pregnant before: does this sound like the mucous plug to you?
Traditionally, losing the mucous plug is supposed to somewhat correlate with the onset of labor. Meaning some people go into labor that day, others might go another week or two before they go into labor . . . but apparently if you lose the plug too early, your body will just regenerate a new one, so honestly it doesn't mean much.
My suspicion is that the more "productive" feeling contractions I was having the other morning did succeed in beginning to dilate and/or efface my cervix. I could almost feel this happening (and can still kind of feel interesting things happening down there) and that the mucous plug, therefore, is starting to come out. But I could still very well go right up to my due date--I'm not going to get too excited/worried yet because while it does mean something, it also doesn't really mean much.
But that is the fun things happening in my world right now! LOL.
2 comments:
The thick, egg-white stuff definitely sounds like the mucus plug to me. As you know, I lost some(?) of mine a couple weeks ago (including some with blood), but I haven't gone into labor yet! Since then though, I have been having more discharge than before - but like you, it's more of the watery kind.
When I asked my midwife about it, she said anything that affects the cervix can dislodge some or all of the mucus plug. So, I could definitely see your false labor the other day causing this to happen.
I tend to lose my plug for weeks, even more than a month, so it really doesn't mean much about when labor will start - it does however mean that changes are taking place down there, and that all by itself is exciting!
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