Before we got pregnant we, (well Hannah), watched a lot of a programme called One born every minute. A show about different women in the UK given by birth in different ways. It didn’t really focus on pregnancy, the third trimester, the three months before giving birth. This is a stage that we didn’t think about too much, we thought, for the most part, it would be peaches and roses until labour, but we were wrong.

Let me preface this post by saying everyone and every pregnancy is different. What we have gone through will not be the experience of many people who read this so please keep that in mind.

Lockdown and preeclampsia are a horrible combination of things to have during pregnancy. One of those things is bad enough but the two of them together, well three if you want to add in a child with bronchial pulmonary sequestration, are all things that can induce stress, anxiety, and massive discomfort. We had heard Hannah’s mother was glowing through her three pregnancies so I assumed are first would be the same, like mother like daughter right? This couldn’t have been more wrong in our case.

For those who don’t know what preeclampsia is, Google is your friend, but I’ll give a super brief description. It’s a condition with the placenta which causes the mother to have high blood pressure, low platelet levels in their blood and protein in their urine. No one knows exactly what causes it but in extreme cases, it could cause issues with the liver and the kidneys of the mother, so the quicker they get the placenta out, the better. You can imagine how much stress this caused when we found out Hannah had this. Now, this is not to say the pregnancy was all good before this diagnosis. Hannah got a lot of headaches and became dizzy from time to time and knowing this helped us pinpoint the issue. She took tablets to out the blood pressure down and had regular appointments at the hospital, which I couldn’t attend because of coronavirus, but yeah, this wasn’t a fun time.

To top it off there were a lot of weird things that happened to Hannah. She got frequent nosebleeds, stomach aches, sciatica, haemorrhoids, lower back pains. There was a period when Hannah felt like she was going to throw up so she slept with a bucket next to her for a few days. Hannah’s bladder was weak which means wherever we went there needed to be a toilet close by. Prior to the lockdown, this would have been fine but during it, a lot of places, and toilets were shut so we could only make it to close by parks. And even further into the pregnancy, Hannah’s pelvis was in pain the more she walked. So we ended up keeping walking to a minimum.

There were plenty of times where Hannah was very convinced she would die giving birth. She felt it in her heart, she felt weak and uncomfortable which was always worrying to hear. I told her it wouldn’t happen and I was sure of that, but sometimes when she spoke about life insurance and what would happen after she dies thoughts did crop into my mind. The fact is that in 100,000 women less than 10 of them in the UK die from childbirth. But the chances of maternal mortality increase with preeclampsia so I can understand why she had those thoughts.

Now I don’t want to keep this article all bad, there were some good things that came out of this. Firstly, we were pregnant, something that we had tried for years and we’re finally here. I could not only feel our daughter’s kicks but hear her heartbeat which was a good way to check she was still alive when her kicks had reduced. Hannah lost the desire to drink tea whilst being pregnant which is great in my opinion since she is less dependent on caffeine. Hannah was induced which meant we got to see our daughter three to five weeks earlier than we planned. This leads on nicely to the next post plan to write. One all about the given by birth process. With that teaser, I will end this article here.