I was 23 years old and pregnant with my first son. As a healthy young woman with no prior risk factors I wasn’t expecting anything but a normal labor. Towards the end of my pregnancy I started to get extremely swollen, and on my due date I had a scheduled checkup. My blood pressure was 140/90 which was slightly elevated, but I was told this was normal and I was sent home to wait for the labor to start. No urine sample was taken. Around week 41 of pregnancy I started getting headaches and blurred vision, and I called the labor ward to ask if I should come in for a check up. They looked through my journal and told me over the phone that my blood pressure had been fine throughout my pregnancy so I shouldn’t have anything to worry about. They didn’t think a checkup was necessary. Since this was my first pregnancy I trusted them and assumed that this was normal. Fast forward, 13 days past my due date my water finally broke, I went into the hospital and the labor was induced. During labor I started vomiting and getting excruciating stomach pain and head pain to the point where I thought I was going to die. The doctor comes in and tells me my blood work shows I have severe HELLP syndrome and I’m rushed off to do an emergency c-section. At this point I’m shaking so bad that the nurses need to hold me down to keep me still on the operating table. My son was delivered and I was rushed to the post-op. The shaking was getting worse and worse and I was having seizures. At this point I blacked out several hours with only blurred memories, until I finally woke up in intensive care. During my black out I had gotten magnesium drop and blood transfusion. I spent the next 6 days in an ICU with severe kidney failure and still an extremely elevated blood pressure. After 10 days in the hospital I finally got to go home. My baby boy was healthy and I survived and eventually my health and body recovered as well, but It took months to process this traumatic experience I had been through. Also daring to have kids again involved a lot of mixed emotions. (After this labor I have had two more babies, both born vaginally with no complications.)

Looking back at my experience I see that I definitely had all the symptoms of preeclampsia weeks before I finally gave birth, and I am convinced that if it had been discovered earlier I wouldn’t have gotten as sick as I did. If I would have had the knowledge about preeclampsia that I have now, I would have been able to recognize my symptoms and been more persistent in seeking proper examination and monitoring.