As some of you might have noticed, I was, throughout my entire pregnancy, a bit hesitant to talk too much about things and certainly waited to make the news public. I worried every single day about our baby boy until the day he arrived--I still worry, but it's a different kind of worrying! When I was young (probably 10 or 11), I remember my doctors saying that adolescence and pregnancy would be the most difficult times for my health. In fact, there were many times when I even wondered if I'd be safely able to carry a pregnancy. I remember being upset about this even as a little girl because I was the girl who packed a diaper bag for her dolls and brought them to our church nursery where Oma would "watch" my babies. I remember making "bottles" for my babies by mixing water and baby powder and positioning all of my Magic Nursery babies in the living room floor and watching them all. I even had a magic nursery pouch that had 3 babies in it that was designed to wear on your belly. It even had a button you could hit to make the babies "kick." I don't really know what Mattel toys was trying to promote with that, but I had one and I thought it was super cool. All this to say, that even at a young age I realized what this potential "difficult time" meant.
Soon after Marc and I got married, we decided to go see a Maternal Fetal Medicine Specialist to discuss if pregnancy was even an option for me. We weren't interested in having kids at that time, but we knew that if pregnancy wasn't possible that adoption and/or surrogacy were paths that would take a lot of time and we wanted to prepare appropriately if needed. (We still may adopt some day too!) Fortunately the doctor told us that it was certainly possible, but remained risky. I was a third year med student when I went to see him and remember him specifically saying that I needed to be in a place in my career where I could go on bed rest if need be at 20 weeks. He even told me that if I were a lawyer he wouldn't even worry about me so much. I repeat that only because my older sister is an attorney and my little sister will graduate from law school in the fall.
There were a variety of procedures and tests that were recommended to me to have done prior to thinking about having children. Some more invasive than others and most that I didn't want to do! Still without thinking about kids yet, once we found out we were moving to Minnesota, I started establishing specialty care up here at the Mayo Clinic, which was the only place my providers at ACH (Arkansas Children's Hospital) knew about to best manage my medical care. I traveled up to Mayo in May 2011 just after med school graduation to see a cardiologist in the Vascular Center at Mayo. He, again not being an OB, gave me much more reassurance that I could carry a pregnancy and even said that the procedures recommended to me were not necessary in my case, which relieved me! He dictated my clinic note while I was still in the room and kept referring to me as "Dr. Whipple (hadn't changed my name yet), which sounded so weird to me!
Once I found out I was pregnant, it was easy then to decide to go back to Mayo for care. So once we found out that we were expecting, back to the cardiologist I went and same day met our OB. We got 2 pieces of great news that day. The first of course, seeing our little peanut on ultrasound and knowing that I was in fact pregnant. The second being that I didn't need Lovenox, an injectable blood thinner, during my pregnancy. Our OB was fantastic and so knowledgeable. He even emailed me several articles about Klippel-Trenaunay in pregnancy. There were few case reports and limited literature, but nonetheless all good information. Maybe one day, my case will be written up.
Although we had some good news, we realized the potential speed bumps in the road ahead and kept the news to ourselves for quite some time. I was able to avoid bed rest for about 13 weeks longer than originally anticipated at the very first MFM consult several years prior and continued to avoid the injections (until post-partum). Although there were some complications, Marc, my family and I all feel blessed that the pregnancy went as smoothly as it did and now we have our sweet, sweet Max!
Thanks for reading this and now maybe understanding a bit of why we kept things to ourselves for a while. I am sure all of the daily anxiety didn't help my blood pressure, but now we have our little one who makes it all worth it!
More to come later, and as Max and I establish a routine, I hope to be blogging more!
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