Iron Infusions
As mentioned previously, this pregnancy was overall way smoother than my first one. It was smoother and easier up till I hit the 28-week mark. I was measuring 2 weeks ahead at this point.
I was HUGE. With twins your expected to be large but my goodness I was just so big and uncomfortable. At this point in the pregnancy, I started having some blood pressure issues. Randomly my blood pressure would get high, and my heart would race. I was swollen all the time and always out of breath. They did some tests for preeclampsia, but it was determined that I did not have that, thank goodness.
They did end up limiting my activities to absolutely no stairs and nothing that could increase my heart rate over 130. My resting heart rate at this time was 115 so basically, they didn’t want me to do anything LOL. If you know me, you know it is very hard for me to limit activities. Plus, when you have a baby just learning how to walk you can’t limit your activities! The hardest thing was they advised me not to lift my son or lay him down. I could hold him but the strain of bending over and lifting and then bending over and setting him down is not something they wanted me to do. Obviously, I couldn’t always stick to that but when people were around to help it was easier.
My iron also started getting very low. If you read about my singleton pregnancy you know that I struggled with low iron my entire pregnancy, but they never did anything about it. When I heard my iron was low this time around, I was expecting them to just shrug it off like they did last time. However, since I switched OB’s that was not the case! My OB this time around explained to me how important having a good iron level is not only during pregnancy but also leading up to the day of birth.
If you go into birth with a low iron and lose a lot of blood, then bad scenarios can happen. To prevent this, she wanted to stay on top of my iron. The lowest my iron got this time around was 7.9. Again, it was at 7.2 with my first pregnancy and nothing was done about it and I think that all has to do with the OB I had at the time.
My current OB prescribed me a higher dosage of iron pills and set me up with iron infusions every two weeks from that point on. When I tell you these iron pills were dark, I mean they were BLACK. But with these pills and the iron infusions, my iron stayed in the 9 range the whole rest of my pregnancy! This was great to hear because when having multiples its even more dangerous to have a low iron level going into birth as you can imagine.
I was nervous at first to begin iron infusions, but they were a breeze for me. Some people struggle with iron infusions due to different reasons, but I had no issue. The whole infusion process takes no more than 20 minutes, and you feel like a brand-new person the following day.
I ended up having three infusions before giving birth and none of them were a bad experience. They just hook you up to an IV like needle and start the infusion. You can see the bag hanging on the hook and then you just relax for 10-15 minutes. The next thing you know its beeping notifying the nurses that its done and they come in take everything out, bandage you up and send you on your way!
The worst part about this twin pregnancy started around 35 weeks. Go to my next blog to read more!
