Labor as an action potential

I’ve definitely spent the end of this pregnancy feeling very introspective.  I wake up (from my vivid dreams, a surprising symptom now added to the “pregnancy in review” list) every morning super thoughtful and pondering, which I suppose is a nice respite from the fatigue-induced fogginess that descends shortly thereafter.  Sometimes I even have to take a nap as soon as I finish breakfast because I’m already too tired to think :)  (This happened today, in fact!)

Anyway, I’m about to totally nerd out on you guys right now.  My musing for the day is that I’ve decided that metaphorically, labor kind of works like an action potential in a neuron.  For those of you who have not thought about high school biology since, well, high school, here’s a little reminder (over simplified) of how neurons fire.

Neurons mainly collect information from their environment in the form of either electrical or chemical signals.  Through boring mechanisms that I won’t rehash here, neurons translate these signals into temporary changes in the default electrical potential of their cell membranes (called a “resting potential).  It takes several “bumps” (excitatory potentials) that push the electrical potential of the membrane towards a threshold before the neuron will actually fire (produce an “action potential”), resulting in a BIG change in membrane potential.  There are also “bumps” that change the membrane potential away from said threshold (inhibitory potentials).  The image below shows all of these types of events along a y-axis showing a neuron's membrane potential in millivolts and an x-axis showing time. 

Action potentials!

In these days leading up to the end of pregnancy, I feel like this model provides a great metaphor for how labor - the action potential, in this model - finally occurs.  Over the last 2+ weeks, there have definitely been little excitatory and inhibitory events scattered around my “resting potential.”  I simply haven’t had enough excitatory events in a close enough time frame to ever reach whatever threshold is necessary to initiate the full firing of labor.  A few different nights, for example, I have had contractions while sleeping that were strong enough to actually wake me up.  Nothing that lasted longer than a couple hours, so nothing serious enough that I bothered to wake up husband.  However, such contractions are still encouraging and would constitute an excitatory event, in my opinion.  Alternatively, on the inhibitory side, the baby keeps shifting position - up and out of my pelvis.  This does not constitute progress, and seems to happen regardless of how much time I spend walking/on my birth ball/doing squats.

And thus I remain, on average, at my resting potential - with no baby.  Every time I get contractions or feel sick (especially in combination!), then my brain immediately hops over to envisioning my own personal little “membrane potential” graph, where I proceed to plot my data in my head and wonder where my threshold is.  Am I overthinking the process?  Unequivocally YES.  But I’m also pretty convinced that when both you and the baby are physiologically ready for labor, a little musing about data won’t make a bit of difference in the progression towards birth.  Until then, it’s something to distract me :)

And truly, I’ve always felt like she will be a Friday the 13th baby.  An uncanny number of my major life events have happened on Friday the 13th - e.g., advancing to candidacy, defending my Ph.D, closing on our house - despite my many legitimate attempts to schedule these events for days that are not Friday the 13th!  When I first calculated my estimated due date from my ovulation date through temperature charting (ovulation EDD = Thursday, December 12th), I was like NO WAY - I am totally going to go into labor on the 12th and give birth on the 13th.  I am not usually a superstitious kind of person, but this coincidental alignment of dates just seemed too overwhelming!  But then my mom was totally convinced that there was no way that I could carry a baby to 40 weeks because my frame is too small, and she was so sure about this that she started to convince me, too.  Thus, here I sit, well on my way to *easily* hitting 40 weeks, and lamely disappointed that things aren’t progressing faster!  Time for an overhaul in attitude, methinks, even if patience is not my strong suit.  Modeling action potentials is a good distraction :)

On the homefront, it’s been excellent to have my parents here.  We have been doing a ton of cooking and cleaning while husband works super hard to finish the last two lectures for his class, basically getting everything ready for me to be out of commission for a while.  We even made husband some homemade chex mix yesterday as a “You’re almost finished, tiger!” motivation present, with double seasonings as per his request!  Unfortunately, what we haven’t done is take a lot of (ok, any) photos - so I still don’t really have any to post.  I’ll see what I can do about that tomorrow!

OK, tonight is date night with husband - off to enjoy it :)