Helen Y

Age at interview: 31

Age at diagnosis: 31

Brief Outline:

Helen was pregnant, expecting her first child.

Background:

Helen is a hospital manager. This was her first pregnancy.

More about me...

Helen was invited to join the study as this was her first pregnancy and she had a high BMI. She suffered hyperemesis throughout her pregnancy and was hospitalized several times. The monitoring did not reveal any raised blood pressure. 

Helen Y was glad she took part in the BuMP study and thought that self-monitoring of blood pressure in pregnancy should be offered to more women.

I think it’s fantastic. I would encourage women to take part if they could.

Yeah?

And I think, you know, it would be great if it could be part of general pregnancy healthcare.

Yeah. Yeah.

I do. I think it’s so important, I know women that have had pre-eclampsia and they’ve been shocked by going to clinic feeling fine and then, you know, they’ve got a sky high blood pressure and, you know, then it was a real panic and a rush and they have a really traumatic labour sometimes when they had to be induced.

Helen Y took part in the BuMP study but was also sent home with a 24 hour monitor after a high blood pressure reading at a routine appointment. She felt it was unnecessary as the reading had been fine earlier when she had tested it herself.

Oh, one other thing actually, I kept telling, I think had once when I was in clinic and my blood pressure was raised but I’d done it in the morning and it was fine.

As part of the trial and they did it again there and then and it was fine. It was just a one-off, you know. As in, I was rushing round. I’d just had a scan. I was really excited kind of, you know what it’s like. And they wouldn’t listen to me that I’d done the trial, I had my folder there, I said, “Look, everything has been fine. I did it two days ago, it was fine. I did it this morning, it was fine.” But they wouldn’t listen to me.

You know, they kind of said, “Oh no, you need 24 hour blood pressure monitoring.” And things like that and I said, “No, I don’t.”

But they kind of forced me to have it anyway.

They didn’t say, “I’ve never heard of that.” But they just didn’t listen to me, when I was I was showing them the folder where I’d written it all down.

But they just weren’t really interested and it felt like they weren’t I don’t know, they just didn’t give it enough credence of what it is.

You know, they don’t necessarily know what monitor you’re using and things like that because I know there are some dodgy monitors out there.

Yeah.

And it just, it would have been nice for them to say, “Oh yeah, okay, obviously, it’s fine. If there’s an issue on Monday, give us a ring.” So that was a bit frustrating.