Coping with a High-Risk Pregnancy

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What being "high risk" means to you and your baby . Chronic conditions that can place a pregnancy at risk . Conditions that can develop during pregnancy . Coping with your anxiety . Staying sane while you're on bed rest

Coping with a High-Risk Pregnancy

There's nothing warm and fuzzy about the term high-risk pregnancy. In fact, it can be downright scary. What many people don't realize, however, is that the term high-risk pregnancy is a catch-all term that's used to describe women who are on the risk continuum at any point during their pregnancy: women who are at a slightly higher-than-average risk of experiencing complications during pregnancy or birth, or giving birth to a baby with a minor birth defect; and those who have the odds of a happy outcome firmly stacked against them, but who are willing nonetheless to take their chances at starting a family.

If you are at the low end of the risk continuum, your pregnancy may be, for all intents and purposes, perfectly normal. If, on the other hand, you're at high risk of experiencing complications, your pregnancy will be a major commitment—one that will change virtually every aspect of your life during the months ahead.

In this chapter, we talk about what being high risk is likely to mean to you and your baby. Then we discuss both chronic conditions that require special management during pregnancy and conditions that can arise during pregnancy and plunge a low-risk pregnancy into the high-risk category in the blink of an eye. We wrap up the chapter by discussing what it feels like to experience a high-risk pregnancy and offering some practical tips on staying sane during bed rest—one of the biggest challenges many women face during a high-risk pregnancy.

" Your perfect pregnancy—the one we're brought up to believe every woman gets to experience—has now become that other thing you read about in magazines. You are now in the high-risk category. Everyone, from your obstetrician to your own mother, is behaving differently toward you.
—Laurie A. Rich, When Pregnancy Isn't Perfect: A Layperson's Guide to Complications in Pregnancy "

What being high risk means to you and your baby
The term high risk is used to describe pregnancies in which the mother, the baby, or both are at higher-than-average risk of experiencing complications. You are likely to be classified as high risk if you have

a chronic medical condition that may affect your pregnancy,
a history of previous pregnancy-related complications or pregnancy-related complications during your current pregnancy,
a history of pregnancy loss.

As you can see from the following checklist, there are a number of reasons why your pregnancy may be classified as high risk.