We have just passed the 15 week mark and are now on the prowl 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 given 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 creepy and OCD side, and is completely unnecessary. Yet keeping an eye on possible symptoms or signs of pre-eclamptic toxemia (PET) is easy and a very tiny part of your everyday "well being check."
Some easily noticeable signs of PET are constant headache, odd bouts of giddiness, pain in the upper part of the abdomen, different types of visible eye symptoms and a clear difference in urine volume. Extreme weight gain can also be a sign of toxemia, and the residual breathless feeling and palpitations as well. These are simple to observe and not something a single doctor visit could notice, but that isn't any grounds not to have customary obstetrician visits scheduled.
Every time you see the doctor you are checked for protein content in the urine and your blood pressure is documented, and those planned tests are taken often 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 visits the doctor can figure out if you are in fact elevated or 'just fine' based on your own specific numbers.
Your checkups are sometimes irritating and obtrusive, but entirely essential to achieve a full mapping of how your body is moving ahead through the pregnancy. So just go to your appointments. I'm the husband and I go every time just to keep myself abreast of the breast size inflations, any changes in the development of the pregnancy, and to learn about any possible assistance that I may be to a pregnant wifey incubating twins that will eventually do my bidding. Yes, you're correct in assuming that my twin kids will execute gymnastic feats on street corners for gold doubloons. 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 tremendously stressful by in fact forcing you to not feel stressed! I liken it to trying not to think about kittens in jello. YOU'RE THINKING ABOUT KITTENS IN JELLO AREN'T YOU!
Bed rest is usually 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 rest at night in the same position.
In addition to the super happy fun time known as bed rest, there are occasionally diet restrictions, salt restrictions, and regular fetal monitoring set up by the treating doctor. We experienced regular fetal monitoring during our first pregnancy and we would drive the 45 minutes to the office and hear our son's heartbeat and watch the little needle draw the lines on the chart once a week. While that constant trip to the high risk OB could've been seen as a stressor, we enjoyed sitting and hearing our son thriving in the room alongside us.
Whether your obstetrician is sure that your toxemia will work its way out with rest and relaxation or that you need to be hospitalized, you may come to the decision 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 side effects to your baby, babies or you. 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 quickly 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 okay. Better safe than anything other than safe.
Now go stretch, because pretty soon my twins are going to be balancing on fire hydrants, leaping over hot dog vendors and eventually in the pictures folder on your cell phone. TAH DAH!
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