Well, it's December 1st already. I can barely believe it.
Pretty soon Christmas will be here, then the New Year, then my second baby will be born.
Just this last week my husband and I were wrapping Christmas presents and I was commenting how my belly wasn't so big the last time I was pregnant and wrapping presents, when my baby was due in April and not February. I needed my husband to help cut the wrapping paper just because my belly was so big I couldn't reach the other side, and even leaning over as far as I could, I could only reach about the middle of the paper.
Something about wrapping presents just reminded us how close we are to having our second baby. When I got really sick with morning sickness this past summer, it seemed like it would never end. Now I'm 29 weeks along. It's kind of exciting because my son was born at 37 1/2 weeks, so we'll see how close this one makes it to 40 weeks.
I didn't get much work done for NaNo this year. In fact, it was my worst year. But on the non-writing front, I made a lot of headway in cleaning my house. It's not perfect, but better than it's probably ever looked. Plus, my husband hung our stockings last night.
We also had Thanksgiving dinner for my husband's family at our place (which was the main reason to get all the cleaning done). Seeing all the tables and chairs crammed into the living room reminded me of holidays at my grandma's where there are so many people you can't see the floor. What can I say, I like the holidays. I'm just glad Thanksgiving's over and someone else is hosting Christmas.
Showing posts with label Pregnancy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Pregnancy. Show all posts
Wednesday, December 1, 2010
Monday, October 18, 2010
NaNoWriMo and Pregnancy 2
Here's another pregnancy related topic from the NaNo message board. This was posted on October 10 in the thread Anything and Everything About Giving Birth.
1. My delivery was painful, but I opted for the no drugs option. I don't know about nation-wide, but in my city (southern Minnesota) about 80% of women get an epidural, which is a shot in the spine to numb everything from the waist down. Lucky for me, the whole labor and delivery thing lasted only a couple hours.
2. I read that it's possible to know the gender as early as 12 weeks. However, most places do a 20 week ultrasound where you can learn the gender then. I haven't heard of anyone actually learning the gender before the 20 week ultrasound. 20 weeks is about 5 months.
3. Gestational hypertension, pre-eclampsia, and eclampsia that I know of. (Note that this used to be called toxemia because they thought it came from a toxin.) These are all part of the same thing, just to different degrees. It starts with gestational hypertension, which is increased blood pressure while pregnant. That's what I had. And for the first part of my pregnancy my blood pressure was normal, then in the last couple months it started going up and up and up to where they had to induce me because that's the only way my blood pressure would go back down. Usually when the mother-to-be has this, shell give birth early. How early depends on how severe it is. I was induced two and a half weeks early, but I know someone who had pre-eclampsia and was induced a month early. Some symptoms include sudden swelling of hands, legs, feet, and especially the face. More severe symptoms are blurred vision and headaches (I think), and seizures. Actually, I suppose I don't know if this is fatal or not, but I do know that the doctors take it pretty seriously. Even thought I felt fine, I couldn't have the lights on, the shades drawn, or even the tv on, or a radio while Ii was in the hospital e they thought any of those things could lead to a seizure. And I had the mildest form of this possible. I also had to have bumper pads on my bed in case I did have a seizure.
4. Since I was induced, I knew the labor would be coming. I was annoyed that they wouldn't let me get up and walk around. I felt fine, but because of the IV and the magnesium drip I was on, they wouldn't let me get out of bed. I was glad mine was very short.
1. My delivery was painful, but I opted for the no drugs option. I don't know about nation-wide, but in my city (southern Minnesota) about 80% of women get an epidural, which is a shot in the spine to numb everything from the waist down. Lucky for me, the whole labor and delivery thing lasted only a couple hours.
2. I read that it's possible to know the gender as early as 12 weeks. However, most places do a 20 week ultrasound where you can learn the gender then. I haven't heard of anyone actually learning the gender before the 20 week ultrasound. 20 weeks is about 5 months.
3. Gestational hypertension, pre-eclampsia, and eclampsia that I know of. (Note that this used to be called toxemia because they thought it came from a toxin.) These are all part of the same thing, just to different degrees. It starts with gestational hypertension, which is increased blood pressure while pregnant. That's what I had. And for the first part of my pregnancy my blood pressure was normal, then in the last couple months it started going up and up and up to where they had to induce me because that's the only way my blood pressure would go back down. Usually when the mother-to-be has this, shell give birth early. How early depends on how severe it is. I was induced two and a half weeks early, but I know someone who had pre-eclampsia and was induced a month early. Some symptoms include sudden swelling of hands, legs, feet, and especially the face. More severe symptoms are blurred vision and headaches (I think), and seizures. Actually, I suppose I don't know if this is fatal or not, but I do know that the doctors take it pretty seriously. Even thought I felt fine, I couldn't have the lights on, the shades drawn, or even the tv on, or a radio while Ii was in the hospital e they thought any of those things could lead to a seizure. And I had the mildest form of this possible. I also had to have bumper pads on my bed in case I did have a seizure.
4. Since I was induced, I knew the labor would be coming. I was annoyed that they wouldn't let me get up and walk around. I felt fine, but because of the IV and the magnesium drip I was on, they wouldn't let me get out of bed. I was glad mine was very short.
NaNoWriMo and Pregnancy 1
For some reason there's a lot of threads on pregnancy over at the NaNoWriMo message board. That or I'm just more aware of all the pregnancy topics being that I'm over halfway through my second pregnancy. Either way, rather than repeating myself or just because I want to keep that information available here for other people, I'm going to cross-post my responses here. Since some of them are pretty long, I'll probably take a couple blog posts to do it.
This one was posted on October 18 in response to the thread Not knowing you're pregnant/pre-eclampsia.
The first thing with pre-eclampsia is that it starts with elevated blood pressure. For me, it didn't get above normal until I was around 30 weeks along or so. But even then, that wasn't enough to say I had pre-eclampsia.
From what I understand, a lot of women who don't know they're pregnant are on the heavier side to begin with. And the heavier your are, the less weight you're likely to put on while pregnant. And I'm pretty sure that some heavier people already have blood problems to begin with, so its not that uncommon for them to have higher blood pressure.
But having high blood pressure isn't enough to have pre-eclampsia. It's a symptom, but not the only one.
Other symptoms of pre-eclampsia include having headaches, seeing spots or having blurry vision, and swelling of your face, hands, and feet. So I'd imagine if someone came in with these symptoms, that a doctor might think to check if the woman is pregnant, but that also depends on what other conditions might share these symptoms.
Also, note that I'm not a doctor or any other type of medical personnel, just a woman who had gestational hypertension with my first pregnancy.
To determine if it's more than hypertension (high blood pressure), you have to do a protein test. For this test, they give you a large container where you have to keep all your urine for 24 hours (you also need to store the container in your fridge so the urine doesn't go bad). If you don't collect all the urine, then you have to start all over, so it's highly recommended you do it right the first time around. Once you have all the urine collected, you take it to the lab and they test it for proteins. There's something about pre-eclampsia that makes it so you can't properly process protein and that shows up in your urine. It also doesn't matter if you eat a lot of meat (have a high protein diet) or are vegetation and eat a low protein diet (like I do). (I asked about this, because I thought it might interfere with my results, but it doesn't.)
My protein test came up as negative for pre-eclampsia, but they still had me keep track of the other symptoms. I also didn't realize how much of a blimp I had become (like how swollen my face, hands, feet, and legs were) until after I had given birth and look at the birth pictures. My sister said I looked like a football player with how swollen I was.
If there is swelling, they'll suggest you go on bed rest and try to put your feet up whenever you sit down. For me, my "bed rest" was to lay down for six hours a day (in addition to sleeping at night) and this could be broken up into two hours, three times a day. They also suggested that I sleep with my feet up, which meant putting a pillow under my feet, which is a little uncomfortable when you can only sleep on your side. (Sleeping on your side only is for any pregnant woman more than 18 weeks along.)
Though just because the swelling goes down doesn't mean your blood pressure will go down. I was able to get some of the swelling down in my legs and feet, but my blood pressure still went up.
As to the differences between pre-eclampsia and eclampsia, I'm not really sure what they are. Eclampsia is more severe, but even with gestational hypertension, they still treated me as though I had eclampsia when I was in the hospital to give birth.
Actually, I think one of the biggest symptoms of eclampsia is the seizures. When I was in the hospital, they wouldn't let me watch tv, listen to music, open the window, or even turn on the lights brighter than a low lamp because they thought any of those things could give me a seizure, thus making it so I had eclampsia. They even put bumper pads on my bed and added an extra pad over the mattress to make it extra soft in case I did have a seizure.
With me, they had to induce labor because my blood pressure wasn't going down and they figured the only way it would go back down to a healthy level would be to get the baby out of my body. I was about 37 and a half weeks along. (But then 36 - 37 weeks is near-term, 38 - 40 weeks is term, and 41 - 42 weeks is post term.) I don't remember exactly what my blood pressure was, but whenever I told health care professionals what it was, they were pretty shocked/horrified by how high it was.
I don't know if there's really a length of time in which it goes from pre-eclampsia to eclampsia. I think it just depends on the woman and what are symptoms are.
I only had gestational hypertension and was induced about two and a half weeks early. I know know who had pre-eclampsia or maybe eclampsia (I didn't talk to her that much, only that when I said I only had gestational hypertension she was like oh, well that's nothing, which was kind of insulting to me because what I went through wasn't "nothing") who was induced a month early. He baby even had to spend time in an incubator whereas mine didn't.
If this were to go untreated, I don't know how long the baby could survive. But I'd imagine that a doctor or someone might get the idea to see if this woman is pregnant or not, be able to do a pregnancy test/ultrasound, and then get the woman induced if they were that afraid of her having eclampsia.
Depending on how good the hospital is (like how week equipped they are, whether they're in a large city or a small town, and whether they specialize in babies or not) depends on how long a child can survive. Like I heard about a baby surviving (I don't know how long) when it was born around 22 weeks, but it was connected to an incubator and various medical things to keep it alive. But that never would have happened at the hospital was in, because it's just smaller and not equipped to deal with a situation like that. Also, this story happened at one of the children's hospitals in the Twin Cities, which specializes in infants and children.
And if the induction doesn't work for a woman, depending on how severe the pre-eclampsia/eclampsia is, she may need to have an emergency C-section.
I don't know if I actually answered your question, but I hope you find something useful in my long post.
This one was posted on October 18 in response to the thread Not knowing you're pregnant/pre-eclampsia.
The first thing with pre-eclampsia is that it starts with elevated blood pressure. For me, it didn't get above normal until I was around 30 weeks along or so. But even then, that wasn't enough to say I had pre-eclampsia.
From what I understand, a lot of women who don't know they're pregnant are on the heavier side to begin with. And the heavier your are, the less weight you're likely to put on while pregnant. And I'm pretty sure that some heavier people already have blood problems to begin with, so its not that uncommon for them to have higher blood pressure.
But having high blood pressure isn't enough to have pre-eclampsia. It's a symptom, but not the only one.
Other symptoms of pre-eclampsia include having headaches, seeing spots or having blurry vision, and swelling of your face, hands, and feet. So I'd imagine if someone came in with these symptoms, that a doctor might think to check if the woman is pregnant, but that also depends on what other conditions might share these symptoms.
Also, note that I'm not a doctor or any other type of medical personnel, just a woman who had gestational hypertension with my first pregnancy.
To determine if it's more than hypertension (high blood pressure), you have to do a protein test. For this test, they give you a large container where you have to keep all your urine for 24 hours (you also need to store the container in your fridge so the urine doesn't go bad). If you don't collect all the urine, then you have to start all over, so it's highly recommended you do it right the first time around. Once you have all the urine collected, you take it to the lab and they test it for proteins. There's something about pre-eclampsia that makes it so you can't properly process protein and that shows up in your urine. It also doesn't matter if you eat a lot of meat (have a high protein diet) or are vegetation and eat a low protein diet (like I do). (I asked about this, because I thought it might interfere with my results, but it doesn't.)
My protein test came up as negative for pre-eclampsia, but they still had me keep track of the other symptoms. I also didn't realize how much of a blimp I had become (like how swollen my face, hands, feet, and legs were) until after I had given birth and look at the birth pictures. My sister said I looked like a football player with how swollen I was.
If there is swelling, they'll suggest you go on bed rest and try to put your feet up whenever you sit down. For me, my "bed rest" was to lay down for six hours a day (in addition to sleeping at night) and this could be broken up into two hours, three times a day. They also suggested that I sleep with my feet up, which meant putting a pillow under my feet, which is a little uncomfortable when you can only sleep on your side. (Sleeping on your side only is for any pregnant woman more than 18 weeks along.)
Though just because the swelling goes down doesn't mean your blood pressure will go down. I was able to get some of the swelling down in my legs and feet, but my blood pressure still went up.
As to the differences between pre-eclampsia and eclampsia, I'm not really sure what they are. Eclampsia is more severe, but even with gestational hypertension, they still treated me as though I had eclampsia when I was in the hospital to give birth.
Actually, I think one of the biggest symptoms of eclampsia is the seizures. When I was in the hospital, they wouldn't let me watch tv, listen to music, open the window, or even turn on the lights brighter than a low lamp because they thought any of those things could give me a seizure, thus making it so I had eclampsia. They even put bumper pads on my bed and added an extra pad over the mattress to make it extra soft in case I did have a seizure.
With me, they had to induce labor because my blood pressure wasn't going down and they figured the only way it would go back down to a healthy level would be to get the baby out of my body. I was about 37 and a half weeks along. (But then 36 - 37 weeks is near-term, 38 - 40 weeks is term, and 41 - 42 weeks is post term.) I don't remember exactly what my blood pressure was, but whenever I told health care professionals what it was, they were pretty shocked/horrified by how high it was.
I don't know if there's really a length of time in which it goes from pre-eclampsia to eclampsia. I think it just depends on the woman and what are symptoms are.
I only had gestational hypertension and was induced about two and a half weeks early. I know know who had pre-eclampsia or maybe eclampsia (I didn't talk to her that much, only that when I said I only had gestational hypertension she was like oh, well that's nothing, which was kind of insulting to me because what I went through wasn't "nothing") who was induced a month early. He baby even had to spend time in an incubator whereas mine didn't.
If this were to go untreated, I don't know how long the baby could survive. But I'd imagine that a doctor or someone might get the idea to see if this woman is pregnant or not, be able to do a pregnancy test/ultrasound, and then get the woman induced if they were that afraid of her having eclampsia.
Depending on how good the hospital is (like how week equipped they are, whether they're in a large city or a small town, and whether they specialize in babies or not) depends on how long a child can survive. Like I heard about a baby surviving (I don't know how long) when it was born around 22 weeks, but it was connected to an incubator and various medical things to keep it alive. But that never would have happened at the hospital was in, because it's just smaller and not equipped to deal with a situation like that. Also, this story happened at one of the children's hospitals in the Twin Cities, which specializes in infants and children.
And if the induction doesn't work for a woman, depending on how severe the pre-eclampsia/eclampsia is, she may need to have an emergency C-section.
I don't know if I actually answered your question, but I hope you find something useful in my long post.
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