My Non Typical Pregnancy

So here's the deal, if you've been pregnant before you know that no pregnancy is the same.  Just by talking with friends, coworkers, family; everyone experiences pregnancy different.  Each woman has a different experience but may have to follow a different plan after finding out they're pregnant.  For example, some women, like me become anemic while pregnant so they have to take additional iron supplements.  There are many different ways each pregnancy could differ and I'm here to tell you about how mine is different.

If you've followed the blog for a while, you probably read about my pregnancy journey. To summarize, I've been pregnant 5 times.  The first 3 pregnancies resulted in miscarriage and my OBGYN was stumped so I was sent to a reproductive endocrinologist for testing.  After loads of tests, procedures, and blood work, we found out that I have several things factoring into why the pregnancies may have failed.  Two of the larger issues being MTHFR and a protein S deficiency.  For the MTHFR I have to take additional folic acid and for the protein S deficiency I have to take a blood thinner every day while pregnant.

3 month supply

So each time I'm pregnant I immediately call my OBGYN and I immediately begin daily injections to thin my blood.  I take these up to 35weeks and then I switch over to twice daily injections of a different type of thinner which has a shorter half life.  So in lei-mans terms that means if I go into labor the later blood thinner wears off quicker than the first so there's a lesser concern for bleeding during delivery.

12 day supply

When you're going into a surgery, it's even more necessary to watch the risk of bleeding.  It's not a very exciting thing to do while pregnant but the pain and discomfort is all worth it in the end.

Morning injection

By the end of this pregnancy I'll have injected myself approximately 294 times!  Not including the 6 weeks of injections following delivery that I'll have to complete as the risk of clotting increases after delivery.  When people hear that I have to inject myself daily, I can see and oftentimes hear the pity in each of their faces/voices.  What I want people to know is that even though it sucks and is not at all pleasurable, it's worth the pain and the intrusion to my schedule because I get a cute squishy baby out of it all.  Someone out there has it worse than me so I cannot and will not complain about my journey and pray that anyone with the same issues I have are able to quickly discover the issue to treat appropriately.

-stephanie

PS.  Only 9 days to go!!