34 Weeks Pregnant - low platelets again!
My Pregnancy 2025 Alison Marshall My Pregnancy 2025 Alison Marshall

34 Weeks Pregnant - low platelets again!

Last week’s blood tests show my platelets have dropped off a bit again, which for Australian standards has technically put me back in the range of gestational thrombocytopaenia (very borderline still). Platelets dropping during pregnancy is physiologically normal for some women, and certainly seems to be my norm, since I know it happened with my first pregnancy too.

Read More
30 Weeks Pregnant - good news!
My Pregnancy 2025 Alison Marshall My Pregnancy 2025 Alison Marshall

30 Weeks Pregnant - good news!

This is going to be a very brief post today, but in keeping with the festive season I am celebrating some good news! Not only did my latest tests come up negative for any pathologies that could have been linked to the low platelets, but my platelet levels have gone up already, and are actually back into the acceptable range!

Read More
29 Weeks Pregnant - is my baby too big to be born vaginally?
My Pregnancy 2025 Alison Marshall My Pregnancy 2025 Alison Marshall

29 Weeks Pregnant - is my baby too big to be born vaginally?

When I had my morphology ultrasound around 21 weeks, the sonographer commented that baby was measuring in the 96th percentile, and that my provider would probably want to schedule growth scans during third trimester to make sure baby wasn't getting too big. I just smiled and thanked her, but I knew that we would not be planning any growth scans based purely on this comment...

Read More
28 Weeks Pregnant - my diagnosis of gestational thrombocytopaenia and iron deficiency
My Pregnancy 2025 Alison Marshall My Pregnancy 2025 Alison Marshall

28 Weeks Pregnant - my diagnosis of gestational thrombocytopaenia and iron deficiency

If you’re asking “Thrombo...umm, what even is that??”, that’s a perfectly valid question! It’s a fancy name for “low platelets”, and no, I wasn’t familiar with the term before either! It’s a relatively common condition in pregnancy, although the diagnosis is quite subjective. In Australia, the accepted “healthy minimum” level of platelets shows up as 150 on your blood test results, so anything below that is diagnosed as thrombocytopaenia. In Italy, where I had my first baby, they calculate the minimum as 130, so the level of 145 on my latest blood test results wouldn’t have even raised an eyebrow there.

Read More