Lin -- get thee to the perinatologist...

From: cathy:- (anonymous@medispecialty.com)
Sun Dec 9 22:05:39 2001


At Sun, 9 Dec 2001, Lin wrote: >
>I'm so excited. But scared too. Scared I'll miscarry again... John
>says as long as I take it easy and don't do anything stupid that
>everything will probably be allright, and if it goes wrong that we'll
>just have to try again. The other silly thing is we're unsure how far
>along I am! You see, last time I had a period, which is now well over 6
>weeks ago... it was a very weird one - it was very light (which is very
>unusual for me - the norm is ultra heavy!) and also it only lasted two
>days (which was another weird thing for usually I bleed for about 7
>days). It's all a bit of a laugh really. Here we were worrying about
>wanting to start a family, thinking it wasn't going to happen and it had
>already happened! ***LOL*** Oh well, my doctor will just have to help us
>figure things out.
>

After my disasterous first birth experience I went out and became kind of an expert on pregnancy, childbirth and breastfeeding so that things would go better the next time. (And they DID go better -- but to be honest there was a lot a luck there.) And to be blunt, I'm really pretty worried about you being pregnant while on so many strong drugs. Especially if you are 8 weeks along rather than just 4. (By the way, that weird period could have been "implantation bleeding" for a pregnancy that started 8 weeks ago. Or it could be that you didn't ovulate 8 weeks ago -- most women have the occasional cycle with no ovulation -- and so you didn't have enough hormones going to get a good heavy period. The only way to really tell is an ultrasound right now. At this point the difference between 4 weeks and 8 weeks is very obvious.) When the embryo is right about 20 days old circulation starts, and they have blood supplies. I'm not sure how long it takes before you start sharing blood with your baby in a big way, but it's not much later than 3 weeks.

I think you need to see a specialist basically right now. Because different drugs act differently. There is a membrane between your blood and the baby's placenta. This membrane will filter out certain molecules and let other ones through. (Basically the small molecules get through, although it is a little more complicated than that.) People have these stereotypes of "mild" drugs being OK and "strong" drugs being terribly dangerous. This is actually not very true -- do you know that alcohol is far more dangerous to your unborn baby than cocaine is? Because you are a chronic pain patient the rule for you has been to find something that works and then don't mess with it. But now you have to worry about your little one, so you have a *reason* to upset the applecart. What you need is a specialist who knows which drugs are safest with a pregnancy, and which of the drugs you are taking is risky, so that you can start experimenting to try to find better alternatives for the drugs that are too risky.

The relationship among you, your general practitioner, and the pain specialist is, as you have described many times before, more than a little dysfunctional. You really need to find someone who #1 has the specialized knowledge to find the least-risky drug-regime that works, and #2 who understands that these are your decisions and would never think of throwing temper tantrums in order to take away your right to make decisions for you and your family. Your GP has #2 covered, but is not enough of an expert for #1. Your pain specialist is probably not up to #1, and has already proven to be a disaster at #2.

I don't know how the system works in NZ. You OUGHT to be considered a high-risk pregnancy sort of like a diabetic mother. I had a friend with diabetes who has 2 children, and both pregnancies were pretty wild rides! You see elevated blood sugar is life-threatening for both mother & baby, but low blood-sugar will kill them even faster. And you have a mama whose pancreas is broken and a baby whose pancreas works just fine, and finding just the right blood sugar level to keep them both alive was quite the trick!

Your baby's nervous system will be entering it's maximum period of growth and developement in the next few weeks. You really need to work on finding the least-risky drug regime right now...

--
cathy :-)

Enter keywords:
Returns per screen: Require all keywords: