Kickstarting labour

This is how the next couple of days will look like:

• Tomorrow evening we'll go to the hospital here in Nelson, where I get the first of a series of pills. I have to stay there for 1 hour, so that they can check that there are no side-effects, as this pill apparently can make you feel sick.
  
• If everything goes well, then after that hour we can go home again, where we'll spend the night and the following day, doing nothing much.
• Then on Friday morning 8am we're expected back in the hospital, with a bag. I'll get an internal exam, and another dose of this hormone mixture (?), but now vaginally applied. Over the course of the morning I'll get a couple more pills to be taken orally, 4x the dose of the first one.
• At the same time contractions should begin and if everything goes well then early Friday afternoon the delivery side of things should be over. It might happen that the placenta doesn't want to come out, if that's the case they need to remove it surgically.
• We can stay at the hospital for as long as we like. If things drag on until the evening we can stay for the night, but most people opt to go home as soon as possible.
  
• We'll be there with the three of us: DH, myself and our midwife. Specialists are around in case there are complications. Pain relief is available, as much as I like as there is no baby to take into account.
  
• There is a separate area in the maternity ward for 'people like us', a bit like a hotel room with double bed, bit of a living area.
• I was really not looking forward to this part, but now that I know what I can expect I am starting to get quite curious actually.
  

Get your tissues out for the next part:

• do we want to hold the baby after delivery? Take pictures? We'll decide in the moment I think, that's fairly unthinkable at the moment.
• Then in Wton they want to research the baby and the placenta to find out the cause for all of this - why was the placenta not functioning? We'd like to know that too. So after the delivery everything will be sent off.
• We are required by law to register the baby and bury/cremate him, as he is over 20 weeks old. Another hurdle to get through at some stage. This freaked us out a bit as we don't want to make it bigger than it is really. But now we sort of have to. Then I found out that you can choose your own private place and bury the baby yourself without doing it through a funeral service with coffee and cake, which made this prospect a lot nicer. This is not our first priority, so more about that when the time is ripe.
  

My god, hear what we are talking about, it's sometimes ridiculous and we do laugh between the tissue moments too! It's not all drama.