Erm . . . spent a while up at the Clarendon Wing last night. Just for a laugh. Nah. Not really. M****'s been on these ferrous sulphate pills for the last week to try to up her iron levels. They were only slightly below the recommended level in the first place anyway. Still . . . erm . . . so, sometime yesterday afternoon she didn't feel too well. Pains above the bump. Nausea. That kind of thing. Thought perhaps this was a side effect of the ferrous sulphate. These pains were still around when I got home and throughout the evening. We rang NHS Direct ("Oh, just have a dry biscuit . . . it will pass") who were "perfectly useless", as I think M**** put it. So then we tried the Clarendon Wing, our assigned chunk of Leeds General Infirmary. They said we could pop over, let them do a few tests, see what was up, that kind of thing. They didn't sound all that bothered, but recommended a visit, just to be on a safe side. So that's what we did. After battling through the group of obligatory smokers blocking the entrance, almost insisting that we share their foul second-hand smoke, we walked (lifts were broke) up to the C-floor (the delivery 'suite'), saw this nurse, explained the problem, and were assigned a bed. The nurse had to change her top as it was covered in some gunk, but a couple of minutes later we got a machine that went 'bing!' . . . only it didn't. It was a glorified sound amplifier. A blue, circular microphone was strapped around M**** so as to hear the baby's heartbeat and another pink (?!) one in order to . . . erm . . . I don't know what the pink one was for. M**** was also given a button to press every time there was an 'event' (the baby moving around). There were lots of events. The baby was moving around like crazy. The 25 minutes of monitoring flew by, the heartbeat averaging around 140 bpm. So that's about 2 heartbeats for every one of mine. But it was fairly relaxing sitting (or lying) there, listening to these strange subterranean gurgling sounds. Occasionally our baby would twist around, and the microphone and accompanying machinery would lose his heartbeat . . . but this would only last a few seconds. I said to M****, "Wouldn't it be freaky if he started shouting towards the microphone and we could make out words . . . 'Jason, it was Jason. Jason did it' something like this. That would be odd. Who's Jason?" Who is Jason? I don't know why I thought of Jason. Shall I stop saying Jason now? Yes. So, anyway . . . 25 minutes of baby monitoring later and everything was fine. A doctor then came to see us, Paul someone, and said it was probably some dodgy food working its way around M****'s squashed up digestive system. Oh, and to stop with the ferrous sulphate for now. And that was that. We can't have been there for much more than 40 minutes, if that. We felt kind of sorry for the couple in the bed next to ours (curtains drawn). They had to wait ages for someone to see them, give them a machine, and we got one straight away. The woman there was complaining of seeing strange bright lights in her vision (hmmmm, sounds familiar), was 39 weeks pregnant, felt sick and had really high blood pressure. Ah well. So that was our exciting evening. Nothing much else happened.