Your body
The physical signs that mean go in today
Most maternal deaths happen after the birth, and most are preventable. The list worth reading once while you are calm.
5 min read
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This page is not about your mood. It is about your body, and it is the one page here you should read before you need it.
Most maternal deaths in the United States happen after the baby is born rather than during the birth, and a large share of them are considered preventable. The reason is rarely that a woman did not notice something was wrong. It is that she noticed, decided she was being dramatic, and waited.
The whole first year counts
The window for these signs is not six weeks. It runs to a full year after birth. If you turn up at an emergency room eight months postpartum, say out loud that you gave birth this year — it changes what they look for, and staff do not always ask.
Get medical care straight away for any of these
These are the urgent maternal warning signs published by the CDC. You do not need several of them. One is enough.
- A headache that will not go away or is getting worse — especially the worst headache of your life.
- Changes in your vision: flashing lights, blind spots, blurring.
- Dizziness, or fainting.
- A fever of 100.4°F (38°C) or higher.
- Extreme swelling of your hands or face.
- Trouble breathing, or a tight chest.
- Chest pain, or a heart that is racing or pounding.
- Severe nausea and vomiting — unable to drink for more than 8 hours, or eat for more than 24.
- Severe belly pain that does not go away.
- Heavy bleeding: soaking through one or more pads in an hour, or passing clots the size of an egg.
- Severe swelling, redness or pain in a leg or arm — this can be a clot.
- Overwhelming tiredness that arrives suddenly and is not the ordinary exhaustion of a newborn.
- Thoughts of harming yourself or your baby.
That last one is on the medical list too
Thoughts of harming yourself or your baby sit on the CDC's urgent warning list alongside chest pain and heavy bleeding. That is worth sitting with. It is not a character problem you should be managing quietly — it is a medical sign, treated by doctors, the same as the rest of this list.
What to actually say
The sentence that gets you taken seriously fastest is short, and it has three parts: when you gave birth, what is happening, and that you are worried.
- “I gave birth six weeks ago and I have a headache that won't go away. I'm worried.”
- “I had a baby four months ago. My calf is swollen and painful. I'm worried about a clot.”
- “I'm three days postpartum and I've soaked two pads in an hour.”
The words “I'm worried” do real work. So does naming the birth. A postpartum body is not read the same way as any other body, and the person in front of you may not know unless you say it.
If you are not listened to
Being brushed off is common, and it is more common for Black and Native women, whose complication rates are higher and whose symptoms are more often minimised. This is not a reason to accept it.
- Ask directly: “What else could this be, and how are we ruling that out?”
- Ask for it in writing: “Can you note in my chart that I raised this and it was not investigated?” This changes conversations.
- Bring someone whose only job is to keep asking when you run out of energy.
- Go somewhere else. A second opinion the same day is not an overreaction when the list above is involved.
You are not wasting anyone's time
Emergency departments would rather see a hundred postpartum women whose headaches turned out to be nothing than miss the one with preeclampsia. That is not politeness. It is how the system is meant to work, and you are the part of it that has to make the call.
Print the card for the fridge, or send this page to whoever is around you. The person who spots one of these is very often not the mother — it is the partner, the sister, the friend who thinks she looks wrong and says so.
Where this comes from
HoldMama is a support and education resource. It does not provide medical diagnosis, treatment, or emergency services, and nothing here replaces care from a qualified clinician. If you are in crisis, call 988 or your local emergency number.