The Day to Day in a Multiple Pregnancy

If you are a woman with a multiple pregnancy, don’t throw out all the information you may have previously learned about pregnancy with only one baby. Your pregnancy as a matter a fact will be just like any other, except that, as you know, the experience will be more intense and more lived. Your abdomen will for one be bigger, the nausea you experience might be worse, if you do get an amniocentesis it will be a bit more complicated, and the delivery will take more time. For women that are dealing with triplets or more babies, the changes and physical symptoms will be more intense and exaggerated. Besides this, the complications that could arise are more common in multiple pregnancies than in the cases in which there is only one baby. The following are some of the things that could be different for a woman going through a multiple pregnancy:

• Activity level. In the past doctors used to recommend that women that were pregnant with two babies or more rested in bed from week twenty-four or twenty eight. However, studies have shown that women that have multiple pregnancies do not have fewer chances of chances of having preterm deliveries or underweight babies than those that have a normal level of activity. The level of activity you will need to reduce will largely depend on your obstetrical history and how the pregnancy is going about in general week-by-week. If you start having problems with fetal growth, the doctor will most likely tell you to take it easy. In the case of triplets or more babies, most obstetricians will recommend you rest more starting from the beginning of the second term.

• Your diet. There are a lot of doctors and experts that recommend women that are pregnant with triplets eat around three hundred calories more a day than they normally would with a simple pregnancy. This means that the woman would need to have an intake of around six hundred calories more than she did before she got pregnant. In the case of triplets there is not consensus, but it is obvious that the amount of food intake will need to be higher.

• Iron and folic acid. Women that are pregnant with triplets or more babies are more likely to developing anemia and they need more iron and folic acid. In these cases doctors suggest iron supplements and folic acid.

• Nausea during pregnancy. Almost all women that are pregnant with two or more babies experience more nausea and vomiting at the beginning of the pregnancy than women that are only pregnant with one baby. The nausea can be related with the high levels of blood in a hormone in the pregnancy; the amount of the hormone is higher when there are two or more babies. However, just like with women that are pregnant with one baby, the nausea generally goes away at the end of the first term of pregnancy.

• Prenatal care. Most likely the doctor will only need to do the same as he or she would with a woman that is pregnant with one baby. The doctor will measure your arterial pressure, weigh you and get urine samples in every prenatal check up, however since you do have more than one baby in you, you may be asked to visit more frequently. A lot of doctors will also do routine pelvic exams in order to make sure that the neck of the uterus is not dilating too soon. Other doctors will also do more sonograms. However, if there are not premature labor symptoms the doctor may just decide that these exams are not needed that frequently.

• Sonograms. Almost all doctors suggest that women that are pregnant with two babies or more get a sonogram done on them every four to six weeks through out the whole pregnancy to check how the fetus is growing. If there is a problem in the pregnancy though, you may need to do these exams more frequently.

• Since you are pregnant with more than one baby, the doctor will not be able to base himself on the uterine height to evaluate how the baby is growing. And since there is a risk of premature delivery and growth problems in these types of pregnancies, periodic sonograms are extremely important.

• Weight gain. The average amount of weight a woman that is pregnant with twins is around fifteen to twenty kilograms, however the exact amount of weight you will gain will depend on how much you weighed before you got pregnant. It has been recommended that women that are pregnant with twins should gain around half a kilogram a week during the second a third terms. There have also been some recent studies that show that optimum rates of growth can be achieved if you keep in mind the index of body weight you had before you were pregnant and that the weight gained during the first and second term are specifically important. Doctors generally suggest a woman should gain around twenty to twenty three kilograms when they are around thirty four weeks pregnant in the case of women that are pregnant with triplets and that they should gain more than twenty three kilograms in the case of quadruplets.