Abigail

Age at interview: 40

Age at diagnosis: 40

Brief Outline:

Abigail was pregnant with her first child. She was invited to join the BuMP trial.

Background:

Abigail was pregnant with her first daughter. She is an IT consultant.

More about me...

Abigail was pregnant with her first child and invited to join the BuMP study because of her age and BMI. She monitored her blood pressure (BP) throughout her pregnancy but detected no raised BP. Her daughter was born naturally at 40 weeks.

Abigail was classed as having a ‘high risk’ pregnancy and was seen by a consultant for her antenatal care, but didn’t find this very helpful.

This is the trouble, because I was classed as high risk but there was actually nothing wrong, I again fell in this kind of in between zone where I didn’t really get extra care and I didn’t see, I didn’t have any rapport with the consultant or with the registrar. I just saw a different one each time. Whenever I saw a registrar, they’d hadn’t even bothered to read my notes so I was going in every time completely fresh, having to explain everything. In fact, the first time I saw the, the first registrar that I saw I walked in and she said, “Oh, I take it I’m seeing you because you’re obese.” [Laughs]. I said, “Well, actually, I think you’ll find it’s because, yes, my BMI is high but also my age and the other reason I’m seeing a consultant is because I have a bad back and I have sleep apnoea.” So again, more boxes ticked for being a high risk pregnancy. So she hadn’t even bothered to look at the notes to see why I had been referred as a high risk [laughs].

Abigail liked having some continuity with seeing the research midwife in the BuMP study.

They mentioned the study and so I readily agreed to it. Besides anything else, I just thought it would be good for me to monitor it at home.

And I figured, the fact that I was signing up to this study, would hopefully put me in good favour with the midwives, [laughs] so coming down the line, I might need something, you know. And, actually, it turned out that [research nurse] was the only midwife that I had any kind of relationship because I didn’t see the same midwife twice, at all, either at the doctor’s surgery or the hospital or the or the consultant. I didn’t, I never saw, I never actually met the consultant. I only ever had his registrars so you don’t build up any relationship with them. Didn’t build up any relationship with any of the midwives because I never saw them more than once. So [research nurse] was the only person that I saw on a regular basis and, actually, got to know.