TRANSCRIPT OF ANSWER
So if you have high blood pressure and you’re coming into the hospital to be induced per se for your high blood pressure, you obviously getting blood, blood pressure checks during your labor process more frequently. Sometimes if they’re, if your blood pressure is high enough, sometimes we have to give you medication through your iv to bring your blood pressure down. The risk with high blood pressure when you’re pregnant is seizure. That is the most concerning thing when you’re pregnant. Sometimes you might have to go on a medication called magnesium, which is a seizure preventative. That magnesium just kind of prevents the seizure by calming your nervous system or it’s like a muscle relaxant and it brings the blood pressure down. The main thing that it does is prevent seizures when you have high blood pressure. Some things to keep in mind when you have high blood pressure and especially if you’re on magnesium as you want to keep your room calm, you don’t want the TV on, you don’t want to be in your phone and answering phone calls. Having tons of family members in your room and talking to you, those stimulations can actually increase your blood pressure and that’s not something we want in the hospital. Some side effects to expect with magnesium are I’m feeling like a general malaise, like a blah kind of feeling. Sometimes you might have nausea. So a lot of times we don’t, we don’t recommend you eating or drinking when you have magnesium running. Sometimes you feel shaky, jittery, every person’s reaction to it is different. Usually when they start the magnesium and it’s a very high dose for a short amount of period of time. It’s usually 30 minutes where we give you what we call a Bolus dose of the magnesium and that, that, that brings on a lot of the side effects from the medicine in those 30 minutes. Usually after the 30 minutes, you don’t feel that way. You can still feel that general malaise during the whole magnesium infusion and you can expect the magnesium actually to run even after you deliver sometimes even for 24 hours after the delivery. And that is provider-based. Anything in the hospital is optional for any patient. You can question anything that we give you, even the magnesium if they do decide or want to give that for you when you have high blood pressure. I would certainly ask all the risks and benefits when it comes to the magnesium, but the main concern would be having a seizure during labor or being pregnant in the hospital, which can put yourself and your baby at risk if you do not accept the magnesium.
