Kat

Age at interview: 27

Age at diagnosis: 27

Brief Outline:

Kat was pregnant with twins.

Background:

Kat is a probation officer. This was her first pregnancy.

More about me...

Kat was invited to join the study as this was her first pregnancy and she was pregnant with twins. The blood pressure monitoring did reveal some high blood pressure later on in her pregnancy. Her twin boys were born at 37 weeks by caesarean section. 

Kat found it interesting taking part in the BuMP study and it made her more aware of her blood pressure during the pregnancy.

I found it quite straightforward and I found it very interesting because sometimes, in the morning, I’d do it before work and start rushing around, I knew it was going to be a little bit higher so I was like, let’s sit down for a couple of minutes to calm down and so it was quite interesting to look at the slight changes, especially as I became more pregnant and you get more, you know, you get a bit more breathless and a bit more sort of more weight to carry around and everything like that. It, the small, very small things that would impact it and I would notice, at the end of the week, it could be slightly higher because if you’re a bit stressed after a week at work, because sometimes work can be frantic, you do notice that. And, actually, it helps self-regulate as well, to make sure that, actually, if that’s going to impact it to, keep it down a wee bit.

Towards the end of her pregnancy, Kat had some high blood pressure readings. She contacted her midwife and said it was reassuring to be able to check her blood pressure herself whenever she wanted.

Okay and what about what the actual monitoring showed? Did it show any raised blood pressure through your pregnancy? 

Yeah, there was, towards the end it did go, for me, very, quite high. I mean, generally, it wasn’t very high but for me for it was it was very high and I did have did have concerns, at that stage, so I did contact my midwife and that was really good reassurance. I found that really, really helpful because you can think, because I felt fine but if you’ve got high blood pressure, and I did it a couple of times extra just to make sure it wasn’t just that one time and it was a bit high but there wasn’t there wasn’t anything to worry about, which was good, but it was really nice to have that reassurance. 

But you can check and you can do additional ones as well additional readings. To help out, so yeah, that was good.