Welcome, Mary! Like Caryn said, we have tons of information and experiences to share. I'm a natural-birth crunchy gal, but over the years on these boards and my own experiences, I've had quite a few of those "out of the cave and gasping" moments :-D. Let us know if you get overwhelmed or if we can help in any way!

you have angel wings sprouting from your back... the Precog will be perfect to have onhand at the school-
I am crawling out of my Blue Ribbon baby cave and gasping...

Welcome to the forums, Mary.

The links in my .sig are a good place to start. Another useful source for management of preeclamptics with transfer guidelines is the British [url="http://www.apec.org.uk/precog.htm"]PRECOG[/url], or the Pre-Eclampsia Community Guideline.

Feel free to holler with any questions; this place is huge. :-)

Hello, I am Mary, a second year midwifery student seeking my FL state midwifery license (laywoman's terms I will become a homebirth midwife)We do not care for pre eclamptic mammas -rather our objective would be to identify in a timely way, any illness and get mom into medical care so- here I am to learn.
I also write as a grandmother who just saw (late August) her daughter treated for pre eclampsia- and have attended births in the hospital for mammas w/ pre eclampsia-
I will be cruising your forums and your CME pages as Im writing about preeclampsia, please feel free to direct me to anything you believe should be looked at by future midwives :)
warmly, ~mary

It's a correlation, and they don't really understand the significance of it yet. My Hb goes up too, but I got to 34 weeks...

That really bad news for me, with a Hb of 15 which always goes UP not down when pregnant. Maybe this pregnancy is doomed already?

See, that makes me feel better already. Just being diagnosed as anemic last week decreases my chances this time around.

The mean plasma concentrations of HbF, HbA, protein carbonyl groups, membrane peroxidation capacity and alpha(1)-microglobulin were significantly increased in preeclamptic women. The levels of total plasma Hb correlated strongly with the systolic blood pressure. The plasma haptoglobin concentrations of women with preeclampsia were significantly depressed. Increased amounts of alpha(1)-microglobulin-mRNA and protein were found in placenta from preeclamptic women and the levels of plasma and placenta alpha(1)-microglobulin correlated to plasma Hb-concentrations...

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19879940

Hmmm. That might have something to do with the rarity of anemia diagnoses among preeclamptics. We've got significantly higher bloodstream levels not just of maternal hemoglobin, but fetal as well -- and also higher levels of the oxidative markers associated with hemoglobin.

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