Dispatch: Try to Relax
Bed rest is prescribed by 90% of obstetricians, but does it do any good?
by Jennifer Bails
June 22, 2009
The heavy bleeding sent me to the hospital in hysterics nearly two months before my due date. That's where I learned my cervix had shortened and thinned almost completely, a warning sign my body was gearing up for labor way too early.
After a steroid shot to accelerate my daughter's lung development, the obstetrician gave me pills to prevent contractions and another more bewildering prescription — bed rest. "We don't know if this really helps prevent preterm delivery," he told me. "But
let's try everything we can to keep her cooking in there as long as possible."
So without further questions or second thought, I went to bed, lying on my left side to keep pressure off my uterus and prevent labor. And all at once, I went from being an independent, go-getting newspaper reporter and compulsive runner to a bedridden patient
completely out of control of her body and life.
Resources for coping with bed rest:
Judy Maloni's pregnancy bed rest site
Sidelines National Support Network - a nonprofit group providing support for women and their families experiencing complicated pregnancies and premature births.
StorkNet's Bedrest Survival Guide
Each day I got up only to shower and brush my teeth, use the bathroom as necessary, and in an occasional fit of guilt-producing recklessness, pour myself a bowl of cereal downstairs. My husband did his best to pick up the slack around the house, and friends
and family visited when they could. But even a nightstand brimful of good novels and bad romantic comedies couldn't distract me from the fear and uncertainty.
Minutes, hours, entire days passed when all I did was cry and imagine the worst. I spent the restless winter nights in the black hole of my bedroom pleading with my swollen belly as I watched it rise and fall, trying to will my defiant womb into compliance.
The medication made me jittery and flushed. My bones and muscles ached from the lack of activity. Time passed imperceptibly, but somehow my maternity leave was evaporating before I could even stroke my baby's downy head or inhale her sour breath.
I have never felt more alone.
Ironically, I wasn't. Each year, an estimated 700,000 — or one in five — pregnant women in the United States are placed on bed rest for just about every obstetrical complication imaginable. It is a standard way to treat preterm labor, threatened miscarriage,
preeclampsia, multiple fetuses, low or high amniotic fluid levels, pregnancy-induced hypertension, premature rupture of membranes and incompetent cervix, among other conditions.
For what purpose? None, according to Judith Maloni, Associate Professor at Case Western Reserve University's Bolton School of Nursing, who has produced most of the major research about pregnancy bed rest and received the first National Institutes of Health
grant on the topic.
For more than a decade, Maloni has been calling on doctors to stop prescribing bed rest routinely to pregnant women. "The body of evidence shows that bed rest has minimal or no benefit," she says. "That might be no big deal if bed rest didn't hurt you, but
it does."
Maloni's early studies took a cue from NASA and Russian aerospace scientists, who began to put people on bed rest in the early 1940s to investigate the potential consequences of weightlessness during long-term space flight.
The problems they observed in their subjects were dramatic, like muscle weakness and atrophy, indigestion, bone loss, dizziness, blood clots, fatigue and fainting. Then there were the psychological side effects such as increased stress, anxiety, sense of
isolation, sleep disturbance, boredom and depression.
©2009 Jennifer Bails and Babble Media
About the Author
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Jennifer Bails is a freelance writer specializing in science, medicine and the environment. She is a marine biologist-turned-scribe who now pens prose instead of counting cells. Jennifer loves digging into new research and figuring out why we should care. She lives in Pittsburgh with her husband, Michael, and their daughters, Ilyssa and Sylvie. |
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