cramping

I ended up going to labour and delivery on Monday evening. Since Friday I'd been getting period like cramps and an increase in braxton hicks. The cramps is what was really worrying to me. They didn't go away and the braxton hicks were occasionally painful too. I kept track Monday morning and they came every 20 minutes, give or take 5 while I was at work. I put Lauren down for her nap after lunch and she didn't wake until 4. Although they weren't as frequent I was still getting the occasional cramping. After posting on a January Facebook group and having many women say that their first signs of labour were period like cramps I decided it was best to get checked out. I packed Lauren up and took her over to my mum's, called Dan to let him know what was going on and not to come to the hospital.

I hate going to the hospital. I especially hate going when I'm unsure if it's really warranted. I knew chances are that everything was fine but I needed to suck it up and make sure I wasn't going into early labour at 30 weeks. I got there at 5 and it took about 30 minutes before they hooked me up to the monitor for an hour. Of course at this point the cramps had pretty much stopped so don't think anything was picked up on the monitor. They called the doctor on call who came in to do swabs.
They did 4 tests in total. A swab to check my water hadn't broken since I've been having an increase of clear discharge (yup gross!) the past week or so, a swab to check for infection, even though she was fairly certain there wasn't any, mine as well double check while you're down there anyway! A GBS (group B strep) which is only good for 5 weeks so if I do go full term I'll still need another but incase I do go into labour before 35 weeks they did one while they were down there. The first test swab the did was a fetal fibronectin test, which is one of the most important of the 4.
Thankfully the test came back negative which gives a 99% chance I will not go into labour in the next 7 days.  I'll have to talk to the maternity doctor on Tuesday but I think I've come to realize that the pains come while I'm at work and slowly go away in frequency while resting. I'm really conflicted about if I should go off work or not. I really do feel like work is making this pregnancy harder but if I go off early I also feel like a failure for a few reasons. I worked into my 39th week with Lauren and could've continued working which is why I put my maternity leave to start on my due date. Money is a big issue too. If I go off I'll either go on employment insurance sick leave at 55% of my pay until the baby is born or go on short term disability which is 75% of my pay until the baby is born and I switch to maternity leave pay of 55%. We could survive money wise but we've managed to put some money aside the past few weeks so we'd have a buffer while waiting for maternity leave to kick in (can take 8 weeks to process) and we'd need to use this for mortgage payments. I'd like to save a little more so we don't have to struggle during the year off.  My last reason is I actually enjoy work. I enjoy going to work and getting out of the house for 5 hours a day. I worry that my peri natal depression will get worse if I'm sitting at home all day.