January 2021 | Vol. 21 Iss. 01
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PANDEMIC PREGNANCY by Alison Brimley | a.brimley@mycityjournals.com
I
n September 2020, West Jordan native Shaylynne Troester was days away from delivering her first child. The second grade teacher had taken two weeks off work at the recommendation of her doctor. At her 39 week appointment, she made the choice to be induced. Hospital policy required mothers to be tested for COVID-19 before arriving at the hospital for induction, and Troester was scheduled for induction on a Tuesday. She received her test the previous Thursday, fully expecting it to come back negative. Instead, a few days later, the health department notified her that she was COVID positive. “If I’d waited to go into labor I wouldn’t have known,” Troester said. “I had no symptoms; I felt completely fine. It was a shock.” It was frustrating, too: she was asymptomatic and yet had to planned for a labor that would look very different from what she had envisioned. “It was our first baby; we had no idea what we were doing,” she said. “I felt physically fine, but it was a lot to process.” “I don’t know what to expect” Berkley Meisenbacher of Midvale is ex-
pecting her first baby in May. She works as a medical surgical nurse at Jordan Valley Medical Center West Valley, wears protective equipment at work and said most patients are tested for COVID before being sent into surgery. But there have been a few patients that have “slipped by,” and aren’t tested until after she’s seen them. Before finding out she was pregnant in September, Meisenbacher wasn’t too concerned about getting COVID, because her sister contracted it and recovered fully. But “now that I’m pregnant,” she said, “the thought of getting COVID is very frightening to me. I don’t know what to expect because there is so little research done about COVID because it’s so new.” There are many unknowns about the risks COVID-19 poses to pregnant women. Of the information we do have, much is positive. It seems there is little risk of a COVID-positive mother transmitting the virus to her baby, and those babies who do contract it after birth tend to recover well. “The best data suggests that in-utero transmission of the SARS-CoV-2 virus is rare, but possible,” said Dr. Erin Clark, an asContinued page 5
After delivering her baby while COVID positive in September, second-grade teacher Shaylynne Troester says it’s the return to normal life that stresses her most. “Are we going to be in school next week?” she wonders. “Will I have to quarantine again? The unknown of what it’s going to look like in a week—that’s my biggest concern.” (Photo courtesy Shaylynne Troester)
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