While pregnant with her son in 2015, Chipiliro Kalebe-Nyamongo’s pregnancy was generally smooth – until she reached about 33 weeks. She started to develop high blood pressure, and was admitted to hospital to be monitored. It was during this period that Kalebe-Nyamongo became concerned when she didn’t feel her baby’s movements as usual.
“At first I felt the baby kick, but it wasn’t how he would kick as usual, it felt strange,” she says. “And then I started to feel no movement at all which is when I became really concerned.
“I hadn’t felt the baby move at all and it felt like I was no longer pregnant.”
This prompted concern from the medical staff and Kalebe-Nyamongo soon prepared to undergo an emergency caesarean. But at one point staff couldn’t find a heartbeat for her baby and feared the worst.
“The doctor saw the fear in my face and then went on to say that I’m sorry, but we can’t find a heartbeat,” Kalebe-Nyamongo says.
Thankfully, Kalebe-Nyamongo’s baby survived despite being born without breathing for at least three minutes. “They tried everything to revive him but then they gave up– but is was only when they gave up that he started crying,” she says.
Kalebe-Nyamongo understood that the situation was grave, but it was only when reading her medical notes after being discharged that she came to realise she had developed pre-eclampsia, a condition that was at the time life-threatening for her unborn baby as it had caused her placenta to detach early.
“Nobody ever told me that I had pre-eclampsia, it was through reading my own medical notes that I was able to understand what had happened,” she says. “I was only told that it was an emergency situation.
“It put things into perspective for me; I was horrified that I could have lost my child if I hadn’t happened to be in the hospital at the right time.”
Pre-eclampsia is a serious pregnancy complication that causes high blood pressure and protein in the urine, affecting between 1% and 5% of pregnant women across the UK. The condition can lead to serious complications for the mother and baby.
Despite having been admitted to hospital with high blood pressure, the possibility of an increased risk of developing pre-eclampsia was not made clear by hospital staff. “Of course, I would be happy to do my own research into pregnancy complications and what I might be at risk of,” she says.
“But the fact that I had high blood pressure and not one healthcare worker told me that this might lead to pre-eclampsia is worrying. I wasn’t told that it was a possibility or that there should have been any warning signs I should have been looking out for.”
Kalebe-Nyamongo, who works as a research and policymaker for Healthwatch Birmingham, said that while researching the experiences of black women during pregnancy, a shared experience was of women not being told they were at risk of pre-eclampsia, or even being properly informed that they had the condition when showing its symptoms and receiving treatment for it.
“I spoke to many women who didn’t have much knowledge about pre-eclampsia, and that – although they might have come across the term – they weren’t truly informed about whether they might be at a high risk of developing the condition or not,” Kalebe-Nyamongo says.
“It’s important that healthcare workers are active in making sure women who might have a higher risk of pregnancy complications like pre-eclampsia are informed about what to recognise or to look out for.”
