I’m 3 weeks postpartum. I had / have pregnancy induced hypertension and was kept in hospital a week before and a week after baby was born. Baby was delivered via c section at exactly 37 weeks due to my blood pressure being so high. He ended up in NICU and I quite honestly feel a bit traumatised from the whole hospital experience. I know that 90% of my extreme readings were induced by anxiety. At one point they were doing my blood pressure every hour through the night, whilst I was trying to feed the baby and pump too! I didn’t get any sleep. Every time I heard the machine I would immediately start freaking out. I was having multiple panic attacks and ended up discharging myself as I was losing my mind mentally.
Blood pressure seems to slowly be going down, especially systolic, diastolic is often still high(I am on a bunch of meds too.) However, the problem now is that I can’t stop obsessively taking my blood pressure at home. I think I did it over 50 times today. I’d say 95% of those readings were “acceptable” however I had a few high ones and that’s all I can focus on. I have two blood pressure machines and swap between them just to be sure all is ok as I don’t trust either to be right. In my head, it’s likely one is correct if I have two.
I’m so scared I’m going to die from some hypertensive crisis but equally the terror of going back to hospital, reliving that experience and not being with my baby is awful.
The doctor has spoken about weaning me off tablets at some point and I’m scared of that too as feel reliant that they are keeping me from crisis point. I’m also counting down to this supposed “6 weeks” it’s all meant to be back to normal by end not sure how I’ll cope if it’s not.
In general my whole pregnancy experience was awful. I also ended up with retained placenta and had to go back to get that removed (I was just a day patient) but they obviously had to do my blood pressure again and it re triggered / if not made everything worse.
How do I get over this fear / obsession? I’m terrified of doing the readings but can’t stop myself as I need to know everything’s ok or I’ll just keep thinking about doing it.