Terrifying Pregnancy Reading

Knowledge is power, but sometimes there's such thing as too much information.

By Meagan Francis

When I was pregnant with my first baby, I read everything--and I do mean everything--I could get my hands on that had to do with pregnancy, birth, or parenting.

And that means I read a lot of scary stuff.

One book in particular, a heavy tome referred to sometimes as "the pregnancy bible", had an entire chapter devoted to complications of pregnancy and birth. I can't remember the title of the chapter, but it's something along the lines of "When things go horribly wrong" and listed conditions that could cause a pregnant woman to deliver prematurely, become toxic to her baby, and sometimes die.


At about 36 weeks of pregnancy I developed an ache in my calf. I had just gotten done reading the chapter on deadly and debilitating pregnancy conditions, and one that stuck in my head was deep vein thrombosis (blood clots in the veins, often the legs or pelvis). If those clots travel from the legs or other body parts into the lungs, it's known as a pulmonary embolism and can, like, KILL YOU. Suddenly I noticed that I also had a small cough. Uh-oh...

Never mind that I was 20 at the time, neither obese nor a smoker, was not on oral contraceptives...basically, none of the risk factors applied to me. And that pulmonary embolisms are rare in healthy pregnant women to begin with. I became convinced--convinced!--that I was just an inch away from death.

As it turned out, I did not have a blood clot in my lung. My cough cleared up after a few days, and the pain in my calf, it turns out, was caused by my increasing weight pressing on my arches (I needed better shoes). All that worrying? Pointless.

After that, I warned pregnant women away from reading the scary chapters in books. Knowledge is power, but self-diagnosis can be dangerous, and it's hard not to imagine all kinds of unlikely things when you're feeling pregnant, vulnerable and anxious.

Of course, that didn't stop me from doing it to myself again this time around, even though I really should know better by now. The worrisome blood test I had a few months ago had mostly resolved itself, and my blood pressure has stayed low. But during one prenatal checkup, it crept up to a still-low-but-higher-than-my-normal-level, 100/70. And then I made the mistake of turning to Dr. Google and stumbling across a website about a rare condition that I was suddenly sure I had.

You see where this is going, right? After a week of worrying, convinced that I was a ticking time bomb about to explode, one ill-advised run-in with a grocery-store blood pressure cuff that told me my BP had shot up to 130/90, an anxious e-mail to my midwife, and finally another checkup at which my blood pressure turned out to actually be 98/60 and my blood test came back totally normal, I managed to calm back down.

So I've been reminded once again of a simple rule: it's good to be informed, but it's possible to over-think this pregnancy thing. Choose a midwife or doctor whose expertise and opinion you trust, and then let them do a little of the worrying for you.

And whatever you do, stay away from those "when things go horribly wrong" chapters and websites. Take it from me, the mom who learned the hard way--twice.