Posts Tagged ‘
miscarriage ’
Friday, November 4th, 2011
Dr. Jennifer Arnold and husband Bill Klein, whose TLC show “The Little Couple” chronicles their lives and, recently, their journey to become parents, are mourning a miscarriage suffered by their surrogate.
The couple had chosen to pursue surrogate parenting because of the physical risks involved with Arnold carrying a pregnancy herself, given her skeletal dysplasia, the bone-growth disorder that causes her dwarfism.
The season finale of the show, which aired Tuesday, showed the couple working with their surrogate to undergo the final stage of in-vitro fertilization, in which embryos are transferred into the uterus in hopes of achieving a pregnancy. Initially, the news was good, with the surrogate reporting a positive pregnancy test to the overjoyed Arnold and Klein. But the episode ended with a brief, heartbroken statement from the couple reporting that their surrogate had miscarried the pregnancy.
PEOPLE.com reports that the couple is continuing their journey, pursuing both surrogate pregnancy and adoption as possible options:
Klein had to contact his wife, a neonatologist at Texas Children’s Hospital, while she was at work in order to tell her the heartbreaking news.
“I didn’t want her to be the last person to find out,” he says. “Ugly or happy, it needs to be told. It was a very tough day, and Jen took it harder than she originally expected.”
“I cried my eyes out,” Arnold tells PEOPLE. “I deal with families who lose their babies and I will cry with them, but I thought I would be stronger. Nothing can completely prepare for all that when it is about you.”
When the couple were able to get together at the end of the day, they mourned, crying and comforting one another and later talking to family and friends. The next day they decided they would continue trying to start a family, with both surrogacy and adoption as possible paths.
“Bill was a rock, and he held me through everything,” Arnold says. “By the next morning, I realized that I needed to try again. We were so close and so pregnant with the ultrasound looking good, and so it was horrible for it to end. But I couldn’t have said I was done. A lot of family asked, ‘Do you want to go through this again?’ And my answer is, yes. I would be miserable if I didn’t try again.”
(image via: http://www.people.com/)
Friday, October 21st, 2011
The outbreak of the infection caused by the bacteria listeria is not yet over, health officials announced this week, but its spread is slowing significantly.
The outbreak, which was traced to tainted cantaloupes grown at Jensen Farm in Granada, Colorado, began in August, and peaked in September, an official from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention told CNN.com. As of Wednesday, the illness had been linked to 25 deaths, with infections reported in 26 states.
The Food and Drug Administration sent a letter to Jensen Farms Wednesday, citing unsanitary conditions and “widespread contamination” at the farm that contributed to the outbreak. From CNN:
The agency cited several likely causes of the spread of the Listeria monocytogenes bacteria at Jensen Farms.
The likely causes included packing equipment that “was not easily cleaned and sanitized” and the use of washing and drying equipment for cantaloupe packing as well as other raw agricultural commodities.
In addition, the agency said in a statement, the facility lacked a “pre-cooling step” to remove field heat from the cantaloupes before cold storage, possibly leading to condensation in the cooling process that promoted growth of the listeria bacteria.
Pregnant women are particularly vulnerable to listeria infection, and at least one miscarriage has been linked to the current outbreak. Consumers are urged to throw out any cantaloupe–even if it has been well refrigerated–that could possibly have been grown at Jensen Farm.
Tuesday, September 20th, 2011
The multi-state outbreak of the bacterial infection listeria, which is particularly dangerous to pregnant women, has claimed 4 lives so far, health officials are reporting. The outbreak is now officially traced to tainted cantaloupes that were grown at Jensen Farms in Holly, Colorado. Thirty-five people in 10 states have been infected so far, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The illness have been reported in California, Colorado, Illinois, Indiana, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Texas, and West Virginia. The deaths were in Colorado, Oklahoma, and New Mexico.
The Huffington Post reports that Jensen Farms has recalled its cantaloupes, which were shipped to Illinois, Wyoming, Tennessee, Utah, Texas, Colorado, Minnesota, Kansas, New Mexico, North Carolina, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Arizona, New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania.
Most of those who have been sickened are elderly, but pregnant women are also at risk of becoming seriously ill and increasing their chances of miscarriage or stillbirth. Pregnant women and those with compromised immune systems are urged to avoid eating cantaloupe, and to throw away any cantaloupe that is suspected of being contaminated.
(image via: http://home.howstuffworks.com/)
Thursday, September 8th, 2011
Taking anti-inflammatory drugs like ibuprofen and naproxen in early pregnancy appears to more than double the risk of miscarriage, MSNBC.com reports.
In a new study, researchers combed through medical records of almost 50,000 pregnant women in Canada and found that women who took non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (or NSAIDS) before twenty weeks “were 2.4 times as likely to have a miscarriage as those who did not. The rate of miscarriage in women who took NSAIDs was about 35 percent, compared with the normal rate of miscarriage, which is about 15 percent,” MSNBC said. From that article:
“I would strongly suggest that women take no non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs during the first trimester,” said study co-author Anick Berard, a professor of epidemiology at the University of Montreal and director of the research unit on medications and pregnancy at Centre Hospitalier Universitaire Ste. Justine. “If a woman is taking an NSAID for a chronic condition she really has to talk to her health care provider to see if it’s feasible to stop at least during the first trimester.”
But Dr. Hyagriv Simhan, associate professor and chief of the division of maternal-fetal medicine at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, warned against overreacting: “I wouldn’t want this to be a reason for women who have taken a Motrin before they realized they were pregnant to freak out,” he said.
Simhan also pointed out a limitation of the study, that some of the women may have taken NSAIDs to cope with cramping from a miscarriage already underway. But the researchers say it’s unlikely that influenced their findings.
The study did not look at over-the-counter NSAIDs, since Canadians usually get these drugs by prescription. But the researchers warned that taking “any type or dosage” in pregnancy may be risky.
(image via: http://www.thelibertyvoice.com)
