When Lindsay Orr, then 32, was 30 weeks and 5 days pregnant, she started seeing stars in her vision. “They would happen once a day, so just randomly,” Orr, 34, of Denver tells TODAY.com.
“I started having severe leg swelling, where I could push down on my leg and (the indentation) would stay there for 30 minutes or so. I started having intermittent headaches.” Orr, a nurse practitioner specializing in cardiac care, started tracking her symptoms to share with her doctor.
One day, after listening to a pregnancy podcast, she got a hunch about what might be wrong. Her symptoms aligned with preeclampsia, a life-threatening condition marked by high blood pressure that develops after 20 weeks of pregnancy and protein in the urine. It can lead to seizures, known as eclampsia.
She visited the emergency room, where a doctor dismissed her and said she had gestational hypertension, high blood pressure in pregnancy that is milder than preeclampsia but can turn into it. “I told the doctor ..
. that I was seeing stars in my vision, and his answer to that was that we all see stars sometimes,” she recalls. “I had that leg swelling that was really severe, and he said that it’s July, and all women who are pregnant have some kind of leg swelling.
” Orr visited the emergency room four more times, with doctors downplaying her symptoms each time. Finally, at an OB-GYN appointment, she asked to see a maternal-fetal medicine specialist because she was worried about her risk of seizure.
