A friend recently (jokingly) asked whether I missed being pregnant. Despite having had a relatively easy pregnancy, I certainly don’t miss the side-effects, such as moodiness and swollen feet. (And I love that I’m able to now sleep on my stomach and move around without feeling like a walrus.) I can’t say I hated pregnancy, though, because it yielded little Zoe. AND it turns out it might have had another positive side-benefit. I know we’re all sick of talking about platelets, but I learned yesterday that my latest count was (drum-roll please) 141K. (A normal count, again, is 150-450K; before pregnancy, I hovered around 30-50K.) My count has NEVER been that high – at least not without the aid of nasty prednisone – and the only explanation is that pregnancy and delivery did something to alter my immune system’s nasty habit of destroying platelets.

I did quite a bit of research on this issue even before getting pregnant, and I know that in some cases, having a baby can reverse a mom’s autoimmune disease, like my ITP. (It has something to do with the fact that a mother and baby  exchange body cells during pregnancy. It’s the same reason poor Zoe’s platelet count was low at birth.) It’s pretty rare for this to happen – but not impossible. I’m hoping my counts stay high, and – if they do – I have Zoe to thank!

-M 

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 6th, 2006 at 3:52 pm and is filed under 03.First weeks at home. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.