We have just passed the 15 week point and are currently on the lookout for high blood pressure or hyper tension caused by pregnancy, or experienced during pregnancy. We’ve gone this far without any signs or noticeable high blood pressure, but we were awarded a crash course on it at the doctor’s office today.
To constantly take your blood pressure in your own home without any medical direction for any other reason than you have a serious complex with paying too much attention to yourself is a bit on the morbid and OCD side, and is completely unnecessary. Yet keeping an eye on possible signs or symptoms of pre-eclamptic toxemia (PET) is easy and a very tiny part of your daily “well being check.”
Some easy to notice signs of PET are consistent headache, odd bouts of giddiness, pain in the upper part of the abdomen, different types of noticeable eye symptoms and an obvious difference in urine volume. Extreme weight gain can also be a sign of toxemia, and the accompanying out of breath feeling and palpitations as well. These are quite easy to observe and not something a single doctor visit could notice, but that isn’t any motivation not to have regular obstetrician visits scheduled.
Every time you see the obstetrician you are checked for protein content in the urine and your blood pressure is documented, and those scheduled tests are taken frequent enough to create a baseline number to check off of by the time you reach your 18th to 20th week. If you merely show up at an obstetrician’s office on the 18th week and say you have high blood pressure, you may in fact, just have slightly elevated numbers based on general statistics. While if you have had consistent checkups the obstetrician can figure out if you are in fact elevated or ‘just fine’ based on your own specific numbers.
Your appointments are oftentimes annoying and obtrusive, but entirely necessary to complete a full mapping of how your body is progressing through the pregnancy. So just go to your appointments. I’m the dad and I go to every appointment just to keep myself abreast of the breast size inflation, any changes in the development of the pregnancy, and to learn about any possible assistance that I may be to a pregnant wifey carrying twins that will ultimately do my bidding.
Yes, you’re correct in assuming that my twin offspring will perform gymnastic feats on street corners for silver dollars. Have a sense of
humor.
That sense of humor will help out severely if you indeed are one of those women who suffer from toxemia of pregnancy or pregnancy induced hypertension because bed rest can be extremely demanding by in fact forcing you to not feel stressed! I liken it to trying not to think about earthworms in pasta sauce.
YOU’RE THINKING ABOUT EARTHWORMS IN PASTA SAUCE AREN’T YOU!
Bed rest is often depicted as 2 hours during the day where you are not upright and lying on your left side if possible. This also includes 8 hours of taking it easy at night in the same position.
In addition to the super happy fun time known as bed rest, there are sometimes diet restrictions, salt restrictions, and scheduled fetal monitoring set up by the treating doctor. We did regular fetal monitoring during our first pregnancy and we would drive the 45 minutes to the office and listen to our son’s heartbeat and watch the little needle draw the lines on the chart once a week. While that regular trip to the high risk OB could’ve been seen as a pain in the rear, we actually liked sitting and hearing our son dancing and grooving in the room alongside us.
Whether your doctor is confident that your toxemia will work its way out with rest and relaxation or that you need to be hospitalized, you may come to the crossroads of determining whether or not to take high blood pressure drugs. If that day comes, please ask all of the right questions and make sure there will be no lasting effects to your baby, babies or yourself. The last thing you want to do is trade actual rest for another drug, because the statistics are safe in assuming that if you take ONE drug, you’ll shortly be on another drug just to counteract the side effects of the first drug.
What our doctor group told us about PET was simple: don’t push it. If you notice changes, take a few days of FORCED REST and regroup. If you are still worried, the doctors are there to help and being “a freak” or overprotective of your fetus is more than acceptable. Better safe than anything other than safe.
Now go warm up, because pretty soon my twins are going to be balancing on fire hydrants, leaping over taxis and eventually in the pictures folder on your cell phone. TAH DAH!
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