My Own Pregnancy

TRIGGER WARNING: this post contains details about pregnancy loss/miscarriage. Please read with care and avoid if needed.

A high-risk pregnancy after experiencing losses.

I’m not entirely sure where I want to start on this one but it felt important to share! I guess I’ll start with the fact that before I gave birth to my beautiful, baby boy I had suffered through two, first-trimester miscarriages. Did you know that between 10-20% of known pregnancies end in miscarriage? I remember reading those stats thinking “that’s pretty low and it won’t happen to me”—then it did, twice (which is even less common). I remember feeling so angry with my body. I felt betrayed. I felt isolated and thought that maybe I’d never get to experience a full-term pregnancy. Miscarriage is a frustratingly taboo topic in our society, but I opened up to others about it and realized almost every person I knew who had birthed children had experienced a miscarriage. It didn’t make it any less painful, but it did make me feel more hopeful and less alone. After my last loss, my fiancé and I decided we needed a while to recover mentally and that maybe we’d put family planning on hold for a while. It was exactly a year later that my son was conceived by surprise!

My pregnancy started with a ton of anxiety due to my previous experiences. I think I peed on a pregnancy test every day (sometimes more than once a day), until I was around 10 weeks and we had seen our little jelly bean on the ultrasound machine and heard his heart thumping away. This anxiety was heightened by random episodes of bleeding (some heavy) all through out my first and second trimester and the fact that I caught COVID-19 at 12 weeks (thankfully I was vaccinated and boosted). We basically lived in the L&D unit during my pregnancy. Many visits and tests revealed I had an “irritable cervix” which explained the bleeding. I remember laughing on the way home thinking, “of course I have an irritable cervix—why wouldn’t I?!”. Anyway— all of the first trimester screenings came back with low-risk results and I entered my second trimester looking forward to feeling less woozy than I had been feeling. I knew that this time around I wanted to be seen my midwives and that I preferred a midwife to deliver my baby over an OBGYN. My experiences with loss were handled under the care of OBGYNs, and while I didn’t mind them for reproductive health things like Pap smears and birth control, I found their approach to pregnancy to be a bit distant and cold— like birth was just a routine medical procedure. So I found a wonderful midwife and I saw her before being transferred to a midwife group that would be able to deliver my baby at my birthing hospital. She decided to have me screened for Gestational Diabetes early in my second trimester due to the fact that I have a family history of Type 1 Diabetes. The test consisted of fasting the night for 12 hours before and drinking a glucose drink that tasted like Sprite that had gone flat. You drink it quickly, wait a hour, then have your blood drawn. My results came back a few days later and I “barely passed”. I was told to avoid refined sugars and that I’d need to retest at 20 weeks. The follow up test was more grueling. Same flat Sprite drink, but this time I’d have blood draws every hour after for THREE hours. Keep in mind- I had to fast. So for a pregnant person who’s nausea was exaggerated by an empty stomach, this test was kind of torture. Results came back a few days later— failed. I cried and cried and went on a google doom scroll spiraling about the risks that GD can pose for a birthing person and baby.

I received a referral to a dietician/GD specialist who reassured me that my blood sugar numbers were not too high, but that I would need to check my blood sugar by finger pricks every day: first thing in the morning, after every meal, and before bed. She also explained that if my blood sugar numbers stayed regulated by my diet, I would not need to take medication or insulin to manage it. I remember feeling determined but like I was under so much pressure. I was given a packet the width of a book about how to eat and when to eat and portion sizes etc. I was so overwhelmed. Eating while pregnant is already a battle because of smell and texture aversions and now my diet was extremely limited. Every meal had to be perfectly balanced with carbs, fat, protein, and fiber. I had to take a walk after every meal because exercise helps prevent blood sugar spikes ( it was actually kind of interesting to learn how this all works but none the less- it was exhausting). I had to eat a snack two hours after every meal to avoid blood sugar dips and spikes. If I wanted anything sweet, I could maybe have a single cookie or two but I had to pair it with a protein source like almond butter or cheese to keep me from spiking. It was A LOT. But I managed to get through my pregnancy without the need for medication or insulin and my son was born a healthy weight which made it all worth it. (I would like to add that I felt guilt with this diagnosis, like I had done something wrong with my diet to bring this on. This is the furthest from the truth and people who develop gestational diabetes come from all different lifestyles and diets. It is caused by the hormones from your placenta. Here is a link that explains it more.)

As my third trimester started, more hurdles were thrown our way. I began experiencing labor pattern contractions while away with family for the 4th of July. Our vacation destination was less than two hours away but I remember feeling conflicted about whether or not we should go. I was only 34 weeks, but with the way this pregnancy had been going I knew anything could happen. I got the “ok” from my midwife to go and decided we needed the getaway and time with family before our baby made his appearance and we would have less freedom for these things temporarily. We had a lovely first day, but by 1 a.m. the next morning I knew something was wrong. I was having contractions that were less than five minutes apart and they came on STRONG. We packed the car and drove a torturous, winding, 1 hour and 45 minute drive through the night back to our hometown and hospital. I was given a shot of Terbutaline to stop my contractions. It made me shaky and accelerated my heart rate. It worked temporarily but then the contractions came back, just not as strong or as frequently as they had been before.

We were in L&D all night, so baby and I were being monitored closely and my blood pressure was being taken every 3 hours. At the final check my midwife looked up at the monitor with a puzzled look on her face. She asked the nurse to pull up my previous blood pressure numbers and then asked her to take my blood pressure one more time, making sure the cuff was on correctly. When the results popped up she bowed her head down and sighed, “you just got a gestational hypertension diagnosis”. I stared at her blankly and realized how hard my sleep deprivation was hitting me. I remember her trying to comfort me by saying it wasn’t too high, and it was then that I cried. “Seriously?!”, I thought. “Another complication!?”. I had known about these complications from attending and supporting other birthing people, but again, I thought they wouldn’t happen to me.

I was sent home with a list of things to watch out for and told to check my blood pressure twice a day. They also gave me two giant plastic jugs that looked like orange juice containers, but they were for urine collection. I was to fill them both within 24 hours and keep them in my fridge (yuck), then bring them to the lab. Hypertension can be a precursor to one of the scariest pregnancy diagnosises— preeclampsia. High protein levels in my urine paired with hypertension would equal a preeclampsia diagnosis. So there I was at home, pricking blood out of my fingertips and testing my blood sugar 4-5x a day, checking my blood pressure twice a day, and honestly feeling pretty miserable both physically and mentally. The only thing that kept me hopeful was that my son had been monitored closely during all of these visits and he always looked great! He was nice and comfy, my body was just not tolerating pregnancy very well. My other saving grace was my doula, Kalei, and other friends I had who were birth workers. Kalei was there for me when I was spiraling. She helped me prepare questions and organize my thoughts before appointments and was happy to debrief with me after them. This support is an example of why doulas are so impactful to the perinatal experience.

I had a follow up visit with the midwives 3 days later to receive my results. You’re never gonna guess what happened— I was diagnosed with preeclampsia! So, more crying, googling, doom scrolling, and panic. Mostly because this diagnosis meant something that I really had been hoping to avoid in my pregancy/birth experience— induction. Due to the risks it poses to the mother, induction at 37 weeks is the protocol for a hypertention and preeclampsia diagnosis. So here we were, at my 36 week appointment, realizing I was having this baby in ONE week instead of four or more. I was scared of induction because of the increased risks for needing medical interventions and cesarean delivery, but I had also come to terms with the fact that my body couldn’t be pregnant anymore. This baby needed to come out early to keep us both safe. I spent that week really focusing on bonding with my fiance, resting, and saying affirmations to my baby as this would be the last week we were connected in this way.

The last picture I took at home before my son was born.

We called my mother-in-law and Kalei and let them know they’d need to make the 4 hour drive to us earlier than expected. They arrived the day before my induction date and we all prepared. My midwives warned that induction would likely be a long process. I was barely dilated at all and basically, we needed to get my body/cervix to do, in a day or two, what it would normally do over the course of the next four weeks (or more). So there we were, in the waiting room at L&D, nervously and anxiously preparing for what was to come over the next few days. I’ll end this post here, but I will make another about my birth experience soon!

Thanks for reading!