“I just wanted everything to end. I wanted to die. I’m not saying people shouldn’t get pregnant, but I will never get pregnant again in my life.”
It didn’t begin like that, says Shefali Bapna, a 33-year-old Indian expat, as she recalls her pregnancy in 2020. “I had only ever seen happy pregnant women so far and thought I’d get pregnant and I’d be happy too,” she says.
“I was a healthy individual – I used to exercise, go gymming - I was the perfect [candidate] for pregnancy. And we tried for a couple of months and I got pregnant,” she says.
“Then the worst year of my life began,” she tells Gulf News in an interview.
The first hiccup
Fear raged unchecked in her veins as the doctor dispensed the news; at week six, there was no sack in the uterus even though blood tests kept showing high levels of human chorionic gonadotropin hormone (hCG), a pregnancy marker; it was probably an ectopic pregnancy.
An ectopic pregnancy most often occurs in a fallopian tube, which carries eggs from the ovaries to the uterus. This type of ectopic pregnancy is called a tubal pregnancy.
Source: Mayo Clinic
“And then I started bleeding. This was in May 2020. I was paranoid. I was afraid,” she says.
Second hiccup
Even as doctors contended with blood loss, a scan revealed that the amniotic sac was in place – a brief breath of relief. And while they managed to get the bleeding under control, it would be an intermittent issue she’d need to face over the next five months. “It was bad. I remember an episode - I’m sleeping in the night and all of a sudden at 3am, I wake up from my sleep to see something is happening; I’m bleeding. I’m running to the hospital and the first thought is, ‘My pregnancy has ended’. So we go to the emergency and they do a scan and they say, ‘No the baby is there. It’s just blood clots in your uterus.’
Similar incidents kept happening for five months.”
Third hiccup
One of the things Bapna was most looking forward to was a pregnancy where she could eat what she wanted when she wanted. But the nausea put an end to that dream. “I got this condition called Hyperemesis gravidarum - constant nausea and vomiting of everything. I couldn’t eat. Drinking water was a big task for me. I couldn’t take any vitamins or pre-natal supplements that you take during pregnancy to keep yourself healthy. I couldn’t even drink milk, so I was put on an IV [intravenous] drip several times to keep myself hydrated. I was given injections to stop my vomiting, which it did for a few hours a day, during which time I used to eat,” she says.
The day-long sickness didn’t end with the first trimester – it continued on to the third. “I vomited so much that my oesophagus was damaged and because of that I had severe breathing issues – there were episodes when I was just gasping for air and we ran to the emergency where they had to put me on oxygen.”
Bleeding during a pregnancy can have dire consequences and in trying to save her baby, doctors pumped Bapna with hormones. “They gave me so many hormonal tablets, injections, painful vaginal and rectum suppositories ….
“I would just cry.”
Finally, after an analysis of family history, doctors – by this time she had changed her healthcare provider – had realised that Bapna may suffer from the same condition her father did: pulmonary thrombosis, which results in blood clotting issues. And so Bapna was now put on blood thinners. “They put me on blood thinning injections, which I had to take daily in my thighs. There was a time when there was no place in my thigh where they could give me injections. And those injections were oil-based and burned. I used to get bruises, sometimes I used to bleed. I was given about 200 injections through my pregnancy,” she shudders.
Isolation, loneliness
The worst part about all of this pain, anxiety and agitation, mulls Bapna, was having no larger family support system in place. COVID-19 was raging at the time, making travel and even meeting friends face-to-face impossible. She was spiralling into a darkness she didn’t know if she would crawl out of. “I wasn’t meeting anyone. I stopped talking to people, because no one was able to understand what was going on,” she says.
Then came another blow. At week 22, Bapna was a little concerned because she couldn’t really feel the baby moving all that much. A routine check-up devolved into panic. The doctors and nurses began to hook her up to machines – cold gel, machine probe, stop and repeat: they couldn’t find the heartbeat. It was 11pm before they did. “At 11pm, they did an ultrasound, and they found that my baby is not growing as per my gestation week – my baby was diagnosed with intrauterine growth restriction (IUGR), making it a very, very high risk pregnancy.”
Source: WebMD
The next few weeks were spent in fear and making hospital visits, says Bapna. “I used to count moments like a crazy person and ask myself, ‘Okay, is the baby moving or not?’ And whether it was 11pm in the night, or 3am in the morning, if I felt the baby’s movement was less, I would rush to the hospital.”
Nose bleeds
Nosebleeds are quite common in pregnancy because of hormonal changes, states UK’s National Health Services on its website. But when in her seventh month, Bapna began to have furious and frequent bleeds accompanied by bursts of high blood pressure, she would find herself almost catatonic with fear. “I had a deep-seated fear that I would die. Then I used to think, who will look after my husband and if I give birth and die, who will look after my child?”
Bapna knew she wouldn’t be able to carry her child to full term now; the doctor scheduled a C-section for December 30, at 36 weeks. “Because my BP was so high and I was having so many nose bleeds, I gave birth on December 29,” she says.
Her baby was born at 2.3kg, dropping in a matter of days to neonatal intensive care unit (NICU).
She developed severe jaundice and had blood sugar issues.
These setbacks – the baby was in NICU two days and had jaundice for a month – added to her sadness. “I was so depressed that one day I just went and chopped my hair off. I had long hair that I loved, but at that moment I was just like I hate everything,” she says of her post-natal depression.
“I took therapy throughout my pregnancy and post-partum too; I didn’t know how else to cope. I was prescribed pills but I didn’t take them – looking back, I wish I had, because of how much I suffered,” she says.
Talking about what she was going through helped Bapna as did the reopening of the international airways – sometimes a girl just needs her mum. Post the pregnancy, she put on 18kilos while breastfeeding – she was no longer nauseous and her appetite had grown. Both she and her husband were getting therapy to deal with the strain the pregnancy and subsequent parenthood problems brought.
After about six months of comfort, Bapna, who had always been a fit person, decided she’d start rehabilitating herself. Slowly, step by step, she began to work on her body and mind. By December she was back to her pre-pregnancy weight. “This is something I’m very proud about,” she says.
“Today, I am so much better, because I have spoken about my problems. I have resolved them,” she adds.
Babies are beautiful and tug at heart strings, but the journey can be long and hard. “I love my baby, but the pregnancy was the most traumatic year of my life. No one tells you it can be so hard, so I feel I must.”
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