My experience of pregnancy health issues #AD

**Posted in collaboration with Emma’s Diary**

When we think of having a baby, we all think it will be easy, after all, we are all taught in our sex education lessons that you can become pregnant from the first time you have sex.

That indeed can be the case, but not for all of us, and not all pregnancies last either. I suffered from recurrent miscarriages prior to having Emmy, 3 miscarriages and then went through a whole host of testing to try to determine why.  In a way, I was lucky in that all my testing came back normal and there was no medical reason why this was happening but that was of very little help to me, I just wanted answers, a reason and a plan of action.

When I then fell pregnant with Emmy, I was put on consultant led care, scanned every couple of weeks and placed on a low-level Aspirin to take daily until 36 weeks (75mg Asprin), this worked for me and Emmy was born 42.5 weeks later. After Emmy was born I had another 2 miscarriages before Harry was born.

Due to the complications I had in actually getting/staying pregnant, it led to very high anxiety levels throughout my pregnancies, and I am not afraid to admit that I did not enjoy pregnancy one bit. I was monitored for Antenatal depression while pregnant, and that really wasn’t surprising. Every normal pain or niggle had me in floods of tears thinking it was over again or something was wrong with my baby.

I couldn’t bond with my baby while pregnant as many mothers do, and I never dared to believe that I would have my take home baby until she was actually safely in my arms in the hospital.

I went through the motions of getting the nursery ready and buying clothes because I had to, and it had to be done but I couldn’t see the finish line at the end of that much-wanted race.

Emma’s Diary, have produced an infographic of common and a few uncommon health-related pregnancy health issues which can occur in pregnancies. You can see these for yourself below.

Antenatal depression wasn’t the only health-related pregnancy issue I suffered from. With both successful pregnancies, I also bled in the first trimester. As you can imagine this was extremely scary due to my history, but it is actually rather common in early pregnancy for many women. I was able to call my consultant and arrange scans whenever this happened, but if you aren’t on consultant led care you can call your midwife to be checked over and they can arrange an appointment/scan at your local EPU (early pregnancy unit).

Morning sickness – yes I had that one too. Not so bad with Emmy compared to with Harry. It lasted until around 16 weeks with Emmy but until 32 weeks with Harry, his was more than mild sickness though and I ended up on anti-sickness tablets to ease things somewhat.

And if that wasn’t enough to deal with, I also had anaemia with both and was put on Spatone to help deal with that. I did have iron tablets with Emmy but soon worked out those did not agree with my body and were giving me more health problems than they were relieving. I can thoroughly recommend Spatone over tablets as it is absorbed into the body quicker and doesn’t make you constipated.

I really do hope your pregnancies are or were more enjoyable than mine, of course, I wouldn’t change them for the world as they gave me my wonderful children who I love and adore. If you have any pregnancy questions than a good place to start is Emma’s Diary as it is a whole wealth of information on all pregnancy matters.